Tomb of Glass
by an REG Omega
Summary: Prequel to Halo 3: Collapse. Complete.
1. Travel Orders

**Author's Note:** (5-17-2010) Due to formatting changes on this Web site, the character sequence I used for context dividers no longer appear in this story as they once did, leading to abrupt context changes throughout the story. I'm aware of the problem, and working to resolve the issue as fast as I can.

* * *

**Tomb of Glass**

**Prologue: ****Travel Orders**

_September 15, 2552  
__14 days to arrival_

Four grunts turned and aimed their plasma pistols in the woods. The rapid firing of a plasma rifle was heard, along with the dying scream of the human soldier that had raised the alarm. The grunts abandoned their dropship, only half-covered with branches, and began to run towards the woods away from the noise when the other Elite stopped them.

Sangheili Major Keom 'Yerumee waved his plasma rifle over the heads of the grunts threateningly, and they quickly reorganized. They turned towards where the sound came from to hear the rapid fire of human weapons. A jackal came limping out of the woods, holding an overheating plasma pistol, and moments later 'Yerumee's apprentice jogged after. Dark shapes moved through the thick forest, and the grunts poured fire at them. One human cried in pain, but less than a second later a loud _crack_ was heard and one of the grunt's heads exploded. The vapor trail from the human sniper rifle dissipated quickly, lost in the night, but then several high-intensity lights came on overhead, revealing the entire camp. The remaining grunts scattered in panic and muzzle flash appeared in several places in the woods as human soldiers fired their weapons. 'Yerumee looked up to see a Pelican dropship with two ropes coming out the back. Two human soldiers slid down the lines, firing at him and tearing up the groud near the partially-concealed Apparition. His shields flared as another sniper round hit him square in the chest. 'Yerumee saw the sniper crouching in the back of the dropship and fired at her, but the marine rolled back into the dropship out of the line of fire. 'Yerumee looked around to see that the camp was surrounded by over a dozen human soldiers. The grunts and the jackal scout were nowhere to be seen. Another sniper round came from the woods and took down 'Yerumee's shielding entirely, shearing off the plate of red armor on his left shoulder. 'Yerumee dropped his gun and reached for the hilt of his sword, determined to die a warrior's death, but it was not to be. The butt of a gun slammed precisely into 'Yerumee's head and knocked him unconscious.

# # # # # # #

**INCOMING TRANSMISSION 9/15/2552 8:23:54.3  
****decryption key: # # # # # # # # OK  
****data burst compression  
****SENDID: 5764801:admiralty-unsc-ueg  
****DESTID: 3233804:secure-oni-ueg  
****SUBJECT: COVENANT POWS**

Reports have just come in that a number of Covenant were captured by a squadron of ODSTs during a routine training exercise. As yet we have been unable to determine what they were doing or why they were alone, but they were captured only two kilometers from the dig site of what is Section One is calling a "major archeological find." They are being held in a Section III facility on Coral, and I was asked to send my best interrogator. You are to report at 0700 for immediate departure.

**ODST PVU footage of capture/findings of preliminary interrogation encrypted/enclosed # # # # #**

S0CO

**-END TRANSMISSION-**

**INCOMING TRANSMISSION #timestamp error#  
****decryption key: # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # OK  
****data burst compression  
****SENDID: #error#  
****DESTID: 3233804:secure-oni-ueg  
****SUBJECT: HALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING**

Unofficially, you are also to document any and all findings about subjects of research and experimentation in the facility. The Department is suspicious of Section III's activities at this site, but has not yet compiled enough evidence to bring it under formal review.

**Facility schematics/personnel bios/known research encrypted/enclosed # # # # #**

Report your findings upon your return to Earth.  
Good luck.

S0CO

**-END TRANSMISSION-**

# # # # # # #

"Herzog, you just can't barge into a meeting-" Major Standish protested.

"Admiral, I will turn this department upside-down if I don't get some accountability for this!" Colonel Herzog shouted. Heads began turning around the office, and one of the Admiral's staff looked at Standish questioningly.

"Ensign, call security," Standish said. "Herzog, come on. You can't stomp into a meeting that's already taking place."

Herzog pushed the door open. The Admiral stood up and looked to the door.

"Herzog, what's this all about?"

"It was my understanding that wetwork required executive authorization!"

"Aw, come on, not this again," Standish muttered.

"Wetwork?" The Admiral raised an eyebrow. "I didn't authorize a termination. What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about a black op on the roof of a twenty-two year old analyst's apartment!"

"That's preposterous," Standish blurted.

"What black op?"

"The one that my security eliminated!"

"Ha! You've got no proof, my friend."

"Do you want me to drop his smoking boots on the desk? Of course I've got proof!"

The Admiral folded his hands behind his back. "Standish, shut up. Herzog, sit down. Standish, you're dismissed."

"Admiral..."

"Close the door as you leave."

Standish sat on a chair outside the office. His foot tapped rapidly on the floor, a nervous habit he had never learned to control, and this began to annoy the Admiral's secretary. She shot him a dirty look but wisely kept her mouth shut. Standish listened intently for the next fifteen minutes. Nobody had their voices raised, and Standish thought this a bad thing. Quiet discussion meant Herzog was being taken seriously, and the last thing Standish needed was an investigation, or worse, the termination of his program. The Covenant artifact that the Apocalypso had picked up before it crashed could be the key to winning the war. The shield technology in Mjolnir Mark V battle armor had been derived from the personal shields used by jackals, a rather insignificant piece of equipment. If something so powerful could be made from such a commonplace device used by the Covenant, what was to say that the artifact he was studying could lead to the development of even more powerful weaponry? Could nobody see the value of his program? If people like Herzog kept trying to pry into it and shut it down, then for the sake of the rest of humanity he had no choice but to stop them... permanently.

He heard a chair scrape on the floor and seconds later the door opened.

"Standish... the Admiral wants to see you," Herzog said.

"Herzog," Standish said quietly, "this is a mistake."

"No, Standish," Herzog said, "the mistake was putting an assassin on a twenty-two year old girl's rooftop."

"Even if there _was_ an assassin-"

"-because you put one there for political reasons. Because you are afraid of what an investigation might do to your career."

"Oh, not my career, Herzog. Oh, and before you go getting on your moral high horse, who _is_ using that twenty-two year old girl?"

"And who is hiding the most powerful object ever to fall into our hands?"

Standish fought the urge to strangle the old man, at the same time cursing himself for goading him on. There were sure to be wiretaps all over the place, let alone the Admiral's damn secretary and half the office staff listening in. After all his work at secrecy, his project was being blown wide open. "There is a war going on, my friend," he said. _Shut up, old man, if you know what's good for you_.

"For us to remain human, not slaves. For us to be free people."

"My conscience doesn't keep me awake at night, Herzog."

"That's very frightening, Standish. Mine keeps me awake every night."

"Standish!" the Admiral called.

"Watch your back, Herzog. Because I'm not going to let you or anyone else lose this war."

Herzog shook his head and walked away as Standish entered the Admiral's office.

"Close the door and have a seat, Major," the Admiral said. Standish closed the door a little more loudly than necessary and sat down in the synthetic leather chair, wearing the look of a man preparing for a verbal beating that he didn't care to hear.

"I'll just cut to the chase, Major," the Admiral said. "This Ronnie Sobeck business aside, what are you doing at Chawla Base?"

_What the hell. The rest of the damn department heard._

"Sir, I am conducting experimental research on next-generation weaponry by reverse-engineering a unique artifact recovered from Covenant space. It's an elaborate crystal identical in many respects to the one found on Sigma Octanus."

"Really. And how did you happen to come across this artifact?"

"It was picked up by the Apocalypso before it crashed out of the slipstream in lunar orbit."

"You are aware that at the time of the crash there was a ripple sent through slipspace that flatlined communications in the Sol system for seven seconds, yes?"

"Yes, sir. I believe that this may have also been attributed to the artifact. We know that the crystal artifacts react strangely to Shaw-Fujikawa space. I think that the decision to make a slipspace jump with the artifact on board was a mistake made by the ship's captain that ultimately caused the crash. Since my research doesn't involve bringing the artifact into a slipstream jump, I don't believe that we will see a repeat of that event. As added security, I've placed it in a lockdown lab at Chawla and given explicit instructions that the artifact is not to be directly manipulated by lab personnel. I don't start pushing buttons if I don't know what they do."

"Would the Apocalypso's captain confirm this?"

"I'm afraid we'll never know, sir. She died in a traffic accident a few weeks ago."

"Really."

Standish grew very quiet.

"Wetwork requires my authorization, Major. I know you feel harassed by Colonel Herzog, but you wouldn't be here right now if you hadn't overstepped your bounds. I also know you're a slick-talking son-of-a-bitch who'll do anything to advance your own career."

The admiral reached into a drawer in his desk, pulled out a folder labeled 'Apocalypso,' and opened it, revealing several photos of the crash site and the crystal itself. "From what I've seen and heard from my own sources, however, this program of yours has merit. I'm going to allow this to continue under your supervision for the time being. However, if you blow this, I will shut you down so fast you won't know what's hit you. I want a full report and continuous updates on your progress, and I do _not_ want to hear the word 'wetwork' again. Dismissed."

"Thank you, Admiral. I'll have the report filed within the hour."

"See that you do," the Admiral said. Standish stood and turned to leave. "And Major?" the Admiral said, "Don't blow it."


	2. Hall of the Mountain King

**Chapter One:  
Hall of the Mountain King**

__

September 27, 2552  
Two days to arrival

Tyler Blancett entered the cold metal room and slammed the door behind him. He stared daggars at the red-armored Elite across the table, who had awoken from the sedative that had been released into his cell to find himself securely bound to a metal chair, which was subsequently bolted to the floor. Blancett dragged another chair over to the table and sat down, placing an M6C on the table between them.

"A curious technique, human," the Elite growled. "What do you intend to do with your weapon, beyond inciting my wrath?"

"Hell of a lot of good your 'wrath' will do you tied to that chair," Blancett replied.

"You show great bravery against an unarmed warrior," 'Yerumee said coldly.

Blancett shook off the insult. "What was your mission?"

The Elite remained silent.

"You were picked up not too far away from an archeological dig site," Blancett said. "Did that have anything to do with your mission?"

"I shall tell you nothing."

"Then I ought to kill you right now." Blancett picked up the magnum and aimed it straight at the Elite's forehead. 'Yerumee closed his eyes, waiting for death to take him. It didn't. A moment's hesitation, and Blancett put the gun back down. The Elite smiled smugly as Blancett formulated his next question.

"Who-"

The recording paused, rewinding a few seconds. It paused again, zooming in on the smug look on 'Yerumee's face. Joshua Murdock shook his head as he watched the video of Blancett's attempt at interrogation. Blancett lifted his eyebrow. "What?" he asked defensively.

"The first mistake you made was the bad-ass ploy," Murdock said. "The guy is nearly a meter taller than you. You _aren't_ going to intimidate him. That'll work on the grunts, but not this guy."

"What the hell was I _supposed_ to do?"

"He had you figured out the second you came through the door. The guy's smart, tough, and devout. The frontal approach is off the table, and you'll never get him to spill all. You've got to give him the impression that you know more than you do, but he has to genuinely believe it. He'll try to maneuver around roadblocks that don't exist, and that's when he'll slip something. You've got to out-_think_ him rather than out-muscle him."

"Right. If we can't beat it out of him, why don't we just pump him full of truth serum?"

"We don't know anything about their biochemistry, Blancett. We got a lucky break with the sedative, but pumping him full of sodium pentathol could kill him, and we need him alive for the time being. As is, your interrogation session was worse than a waste. It may make things even harder. Read between the lines, and you gave him more information than he gave you."

"So? He's not leaving this facility alive."

"No, but it'll make him tougher to break."

"That's great, Z-man. When do _you_ plan to go in?"

"With him? Not yet. Put him on ice for a while. He thinks he's beaten you, and he'll be wary. Let him stay in a cell for now. Let _him_ be powerless. His confidence was shaken by being captured. It'll be shaken again."

"Who do you plan to question, then?"

# # # # # # #

Taking a deep breath, Murdock opened the door. He quickly entered the room, alone and unarmed, and closed the titanium door behind him. He pulled a metal chair to the metal table and had a seat, taking a moment to silently regard the Elite minor on the other end of the table. Its green eyes burned with hatred, its blue armor close to black in the dim light of the room.

"You may torture me at your leisure, human, but I shall give you nothing. You could save time by killing me now."

Murdock pretended he didn't hear.

"Mind telling me your name?"

The Elite was obviously closing itself off. Time to break the ice.

"No? For ease of conversation, I'm going to call you Bob. You cool with that, Bob?"

The Elite growled. "My name is Sangheili Minor Ilion 'Hoksatee, Inquisitor of the Covenant, and I shall be _addressed_ as such, human!"

"Now we're getting somewhere, Minor. You prefer name or rank?"

The Elite huffed but its glare softened somewhat.

"You'll get about as much respect as you give, Ilion. You can make this as easy or as hard as you want."

"What, then, do I call you?"

"Any damn thing you like. I, like you, do not exist to the outside world."

"It is but a matter of time before my forces come to my aid, human, and I shall enjoy watching you die."

"Perhaps you're not hearing me. They don't have a clue where you are._ You_ don't have a clue where you are."

The elite tensed. He had not even thought of it. _Was he even on the same planet anymore?_ He shook himself. This human was proving difficult to intimidate.

"I wonder,_ human_, will you beg for mercy?"

"I wonder, _Bob_, what will High Charity think of your failure?"

The inexperienced warrior was visibly nervous and puffed up with pointless, uncontrolled anger. It was a combination that would inevitably lead to loss of self-control. He'd break. Maybe not in this session, but he'd break.

"Two words your primitive computers could have dredged from any of a number of communications," he said, trying to stay on top of the conversation.

"Kind of stupid to transmit sensitive data on unencrypted channels, isn't it? You don't know who _else_ might be listening."

"I-" the Elite frowned and lowered its head momentarily, telling Murdock that he was breaking through. "You have no proof," he finally said.

"Bracktanus," Murdock said quietly, flipping a switch under the table.

"You have served only to aggravate things! Had you permitted us to complete our mission, the prophets would again view the Sangheili with favor!" The young Elite had no way of knowing that every word he had just said had been filtered into Keom 'Yerumee's cell. Murdock flicked the switch off again.

"So things are tense at home, huh? The big, bad brutes come stomping along and suddenly things aren't as simple as they used to be."

"Do not underestimate my people, human. We are well-capable of holding our own."

Murdock continued as if he had heard nothing. "So you get ballsy," he said. "You try something that hasn't been done before; something to reverse the trend, set things to rights. Surprise, you get captured ten minutes after your insertion. That was quite the brilliant plan." Murdock flipped the switch again.

"The Council knew nothing of it. Our mission was our own."

The switch went off again. Murdock stood up and paced along the far wall. "Really," he said. "So you planned it from the start. Or, rather, your superior did. Now, whatever could have been so important that he would risk such an operation? What could he have found that would have been so impressive to the prophets?"

"The Holy--" the Elite stopped himself. "I shall say no more."

"I'm going to take a break, then," Murdock said. He turned towards to the door to leave, stopping short. "You're not a good liar, Ilion. Your leadership has no idea that you went on this mission." He turned around, facing the Minor. "They're not going to find you for a _long_ time." He opened the door and left. Moments later, a small dose of ethyl alcohol was released in the air in the room, quickly knocking the Elite minor unconscious.

# # # # # # #

The door chimed and slid open. The on-duty technician in the room turned in surprise from the communications console. "Hey, you don't have authorization to be-"

Murdock stood in front of the man, holding up a data block.

"Wait a minute," the man said. "You're that Section Zero guy, right? Come to make the split-lips talk?"

"Actually, yes."

"Hey, that's great! I saw the session ten minutes ago. You really nailed him to the wall. Oh, I'm Michael Jones, by the way," he said, offering his hand. "You are?"

The interrogator shook it. "Joshua Murdock."

"Internal affairs, that's cool," Jones said. "Anyway, I'm in charge of maintaining communications, in-station, station-to-surface, station-to-slipstream. The facility's only 250 meters underground, but there's some sort of mineral deposit between here and the surface that scrambles radio signals. Magnetite would be my guess. All communications outside the facility have to be carried through fiber-optic lines up the elevator shaft to the surface, so I've got to network the old-fashioned way."

"I noticed that a lot of the computer systems in this facility were out-of-date," Murdock said, "older than the facility itself, actually."

"Oh... yeah. The damn covies are getting better and better at hacking into our networks. We use outdated equipment with more restricted features here so it's harder to hack in. Less open doors you've got to close. We have some new stuff down in the labs, but the newer equipment isn't directly linked to the outside world. That's part of why my job is so important. Keep the bugs out. In case of _extreme_ emergency, I can physically cut the link to the surface or any other part of the base. Benefits of a wired network."

Murdock stuck the data block in the computer and added the recording of the interrogation to his report. "I wanted to ask you something," he said, "I put in my code in at the door, but it didn't work. Second time, it opened. Any clue what's up with that?"

Jones looked deadpanned for a moment, then grinned. "Oh... that. The system can be a little glitchy, especially when Quincy gets busy."

"You mean the facility's smart AI?"

"The same. Hey, I suppose you haven't met him-"

Murdock's vision flared as if the image were suddenly distorted through a thousand prisms. The room seemed to undulate as the fractured image in front of him melded back together in a matter of seconds. Completely disoriented and with a sick feeling in his stomach, he grabbed the nearest swivel chair and sat down so as not to fall over. Michael Jones did the same. The two men took a moment to regain their equilibrium before Murdock asked the obvious.

"What the hell just happened?"

"I don't know."

"Well, we better find out."

"Right," Jones said. He held his forehead and began typing at a console, frequently missing keys. The disorientation hadn't yet passed.

Murdock stood up and stumbled out of the room. The meandering corridor was plated with Titanium-A alloy and made hollow _clang_ sounds as he walked over parts of the floor. He kept a hand on the wall to maintain his balance until he shook off the weakness in his legs. Shaking his head, he continued towards the lift that would take him down another two levels. A side door opened as he passed and Laura Conners stepped out, disoriented.

"Any idea what that was?" she asked.

"No clue," he replied, "I'm headed to 'G' deck to find out."

She nodded, turned, and re-entered the room, picking up a dropped tray of rations. There was coffee all over her papers now. Terrific. She would have to have Quincy print out another hard copy of her report. She gathered the wet papers and dropped them in the recycler. After wiping up the mess, she eyed the camera above her computer monitor.

"Quincy, could you get me another copy?"

She paused.

"Quincy?"

# # # # # # #

Sangheili Major Keom 'Yerumee rubbed his eyes. His head ached as if he had been clubbed. The room had come together again, but apparently he had not been alone in his vision. His apprentice was shaking his head in attempts to clear it of the disorientation, and the two Unggoy he could see were clutching their eyes and groaning audibly.

__

What treachery was this?

'Yerumee looked around. He could see nobody else. Perhaps the Kig-Yar scout had retreated to some corner of his cell, but it was reasonable to assume that all were afflicted with the same symptoms. He looked for the hundredth time at the lifeless metal walls that enclosed him. For the first time, the guard was nowhere to be seen. The smell of electricity was gone. All that now held him in this primitive cage was a grid of metal bars... perhaps he could weaken them.

'Yerumee grabbed two of the bars and pressed against them, steadily increasing the pressure. They did not move, but a low metallic groan could be heard. His apprentice looked up with a start. 'Yerumee interpreted the reaction and let go of the bars. An angry-looking human walked over and pointed an M90 shotgun straight at the Elite's forehead.

"Try that again, you split-chinned bastard, and I'll blow your fucking head off!"

The red-armored Elite made a low growl and sat motionless on the floor of its cell. Tyler Blancett backed away from the cell towards the end of the corridor. At the end of the room there was a slightly elevated platform with a console at the top. He safed the M90 and leaned it on the wall, typing for a few seconds at the console. The lights above the cells turned from yellow to red as a hearty-yet-nonfatal dose of electricity began coursing through the bars again. Tyler shook his head and placed the M90 back on the rack on the wall. Whatever had just happened must have played hell with the computers, too. He sat down in a metal chair. Someone would come by sooner or later to tell him what had just happened.

# # # # # # #

A low chime sounded. Jones looked at his watch. Nine seconds later, it chimed again. Jones cursed under his breath and shot up, running across the room. He pushed an alternate code on the keypad of the door to the room and waited a few seconds. The entire room was silently whisked one deck further down before the door opened. Jones stepped into the closet-sized room where the corridor should have been and sat at the metal swivel chair bolted to the deck. He opened the safety plate covering a numerical keypad and, carefully and deliberately, typed in a four-digit code. The chimes stopped. He watched as the display on his watch counted back up, and breathed a heavy sigh of relief. His work here was done for now.

He walked out of the claustrophobically small room and the door sealed. The room silently moved back up one level as Michael went back to his station and set to repairing communications in the station. They would have one hell of a story to tell once they linked with the surface again.

# # # # # # #

Laura Conners rebooted her terminal and looked at the latest data from the probes. A number of slipspace probes were positioned around Coral, almost beyond its gravity well. Their purpose was to burrow into slipspace at regular intervals, gather data, and transmit that data to ONI when they returned. _If_ they returned. Due to "eddies" they encountered in Shaw-Fujikawa space, the probes almost never exited within a thousand miles of where they entered, and sometimes they didn't come back at all. This was rare, however. Typically, it would only happen if there was a nearby solar event, such as a particularly strong solar flare at the time of the dive. She stared at the feedback from the probes. Two probes had gone missing simultaneously.

_Odd,_ she thought. The other probes picked up a large mass in slipspace, amorphous, almost fluidlike in its appearance. A dark smudge on the readout. She could make out no geometry, and the mass was too small to be a Covenant ship. It was probably just an asteroid. She would have to report it nonetheless, at least once the facility was up and running again.

# # # # # # #

Yuji Miyagi looked frantically from one console to another. They were a blur of amber and red lights. He closed his eyes for a moment then blinked repeatedly, clearing his vision. He scanned one console in front of him. The light he was looking for was still green. Yuji hung his head back and let out a sigh of relief before calmly going about resetting the equipment in the laboratory. The facility was still safe for the time being, just a matter of clean-up.

Joshua Murdock appeared on the monitor showing the corridor outside the facility central monitoring station. The retinal, fingerprint, voice, and password he gave checked out, so Yuji buzzed open the door.

"Everyone's pretty confused, Miyagi," Murdock said, "any idea what just happened?"

"The system rebooted. There might have been an air pressure anomaly that caused the visual phenomenon, but I haven't run an environment scan yet. Hang on."

Yuji typed briefly. "No, the sensors shorted out for a couple of seconds. No record, but I'm not seeing any barometric fluctuations either. Those would be there if EM had to manipulate the air."

"Heard anything from Darcy yet?"

"Communications were blacked out, but she's up on 'B' deck. Let's take a look."

The monitor flashed. The image came back to show a woman in a lab coat lying motionless on the floor, a dark pool around her head.

"Shit," Murdock said, "shit!"

"Comm is still down," Yuji said, "you've got to go! Go!"

Murdock was already out the door. He ran down the corridor to the lift, his footsteps echoing as he ran. He punched the button and the airtight elevator doors sealed. Eight infuriatingly slow seconds later, the elevator doors opened to reveal 'B' deck. Murdock pushed through them and punched in the keycode to Darcy's laboratory. It didn't open.

"Quincy," he shouted, "Quincy, are you there?"

A pause.

"Yes," a cold voice said.

"I need you to open this door. Several key systems are offline. My code doesn't work, and Darcy's bleeding badly."

"Authorization," the AI said.

"Greig," he said impatiently.

"Password confirmed. Lieutenant Joshua Murdock, serial number 3233804I-0343, voiceprint confirmed. Emergency entrance authorization granted. Please refrain from handling unknown objects in the laboratory."

The door slid open. Murdock ran in and kneeled next to Darcy, checking for a pulse. There was none. Murdock swore under his breath. She had hit her right temple on the corner of the steel table as she fell over, and opened the vein. There was nothing they could do. Murdock wiped his hands on his pants and stood up, shaking his head. His glance passed over the tabletop--and froze.

"What the hell?"

There was a fist-sized crystal on the table, a geometrically perfect polyhedron that glowed a faint green and was covered in unusual glyphs. It was unlike anything he had ever seen before. Section Zero had believed for some time that Ackerson was up to something in this facility, and now he knew they were right. Yuji Miyagi and Michael Jones arrived to the room a moment later to see Murdock inspecting the crystal and looked at each other uneasily. Murdock turned to face them.

"Anyone care to explain this?"


	3. The Way the World Ends

**Chapter Two:  
****The Way the World Ends**

_September 29, 2552  
__The Arrival_

"Herzog."

"Who is it?"

"Standish."

"Is this connection secure?"

"I'm using a disposable line. Are you busy?" It was actually a cheap disposable chatter he had purchased several weeks before, shaped like a purple kitten. He always managed to find uses for such things, and collected them compulsively.

"Just catching up on paperwork while the car drives," Herzog said. "What do you want?"

"Uh, where- where are you?" Standish typed at his computer, triangulating the signal from the colonel's chatter.

"In a _car_, Standish," Herzog replied. Standish found that the nearest camera was on a crane over the river. He brought the view up on his computer, using a Navy Sentinel to hack into the network and intercept the video feed. There was the car, a point of reflected sunlight on the horizon, approaching the camera fast.

"Hey," Standish said, "you hear they're talking about dropping the speed on the beltway again? From 350 KPH to 300? Man, they say the road bed is so degraded it isn't safe, and it's too expensive to upgrade."

Herzog sounded annoyed. "You called me to talk about construction on the beltway?"

Standish wondered if the old man suspected any foul play. If he did, he didn't show it. "No. Uh... your girl. The one in Chawla. You'll be pleased to know the Admiral has put no-trespassing signs all over her."

"That was stupid, Standish," Herzog sighed.

"I know. They weren't supposed to _kill_ her. Just _scare_ her."

"Spare me."

Standish grinned. "Heh! You're right. They _were _going to kill her. She was a problem. But... she wasn't the _real_ problem." Standish typed rapidly on his computer and another image came up, showing the car's unique signature moving on a map of Boston.

"No," Herzog said, "the real problem was that you're a dictator and we live in a democracy."

"The _real_ problem is that you and I have always seen the world differently. I am willing to sacrifice principle for _results_." _How many lives could his project save_, he thought. _How many soldiers would reap the benefits of it, with improved weapons? How many ships would survive because of technology derived from the artifact? _This was it, he thought. The chips were down. Humanity was on the brink of annihilation. In such desparate times, the ends justified the means.

"Principles _are_ results," Herzog said. "They are ends of themselves."

"No, _results_ are results," Standish corrected. He finished writing his instructions for the Sentinel and pushed _execute_.

"Switching from automatic guidance to manual," Herzog's car cheerfully announced. Standish could hear Herzog straining to regain control of the vehicle.

Standish leaned in towards his computer display. "Herzog, at the bottom of this hill, watch out for the bridge."

He terminated the connection and watched from the camera on the nearby crane as the colonel's car began weaving from lane to lane. The car's deviations from its lane grew increasingly severe as the car accellerated uncontrollably. Men in orange construction vests scattered like ants as the car flew past them. After a matter of seconds, the car shot off the road into a stack of metal girders at over three hundred and eighty kilometers an hour and burst into flames. The girders had impaled the car and hidden the driver's seat from view, but Standish felt certain that if the deceleration trauma or the impact itself didn't kill the man, the explosion certainly did. Leak plugged, crisis over.

Standish closed the view from the crane camera on his holographic computer screen and brought up the memo he had been working on. The admiral wanted constant updates on his progress, and Standish would soon be able to send an upbeat report. Of course, his lab staff were making ground-breaking discoveries about the object daily, and this would form the bulk of his report. More importantly, though, his project could now move forward unimpeded by the idealistic meddling of an old man. There was still the junior analyst from Section I to deal with, but with Herzog out of the way, it might even be possible to let her live. Standish stole a glance at the clock and grinned. It was almost lunchtime.

# # # # # # #

CENSORED FOR: "ARTIFACT ON CORAL." - ESKO KORPIJAAKKO (UNSC ADJUNCT ORION ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXPEDITION)

My Dearest Carrie, I know things are tense at home, so I hope this letter finds you and Oscar well, or at least bearing up. Our work continues apace, and while we are alone out here, at least we're busy, and this system remains unmolested by Covenant.

We've been joined by a UNSC science team, and what I believe are ONI agents. They're actually quite helpful, if secretive, and have supplied us with excellent tech. However, they're most definitely NOT archaeologists and have very different ideas of how long a dig should take.

There are things they don't wish us to discuss on open channels, and I'll respect that, but this artifact is truly remarkable.

The object on Coral was discovered during routine quarrying. Explosives revealed the top of the object, blasting out a depth of around 30 meters. Surrounding rock and dirt were evaporated- but this object wasn't even scorched.

It's undeniably alien. For one thing, it is made of a material we can't identify. It's a metallic crystal, although its mode of manufacture is unexplained. It's architecturally perfect. Walls are identical in height to a near-atomic scale. Symmetry is impossibly accurate. Yet it's rich in detail, and adorned with what appear to be purely decorative, artistic motifs.

We know that the eighty or so meters we've uncovered so far are likely the tip of the iceberg. There seems to be a complex of galleries and vaults beneath, but so far, its secrets remain sealed like a tomb.

Incredibly, it may not be Covenant origin. I fear however, that its age may mean its mystery is lost to time. I just pray that we find some clue, some data that can help in the war.

I love you and I miss you. Kiss Oscar for me.

Ever yours, Esko

# # # # # # #

The artifact was fascinating to say the least. Not wishing to risk touching it, Murdock instead inspected it visually by shining a light through it. Amazingly, it appeared to have symbols shaped on the inside of the green crystal as well as on its surface. It was an interesting chunk of stone. It was mostly covered with groups of simple geometric shapes: dots, lines, triangles, and squares. The only majorfeature on the surface of the crystal was a set of concentric septagons set on one side, significantly larger than any of the other symbols, with an unidentified ruinic character on it. He held the light on the other side of the crystal, allowing it to seep through it, and looked at the other side. What he saw astounded him. Two cubes, one inside the other, with all points connected. A _tesseract_, inexplicably etched inside the crystal itself. If he remembered correctly, tesseracts were symbols of the theoretical fourth _spacial_ dimension, beyond height, length, and depth. How odd.

"How long has section III known about this?" he asked.

"It just got here a few days ago," Yuji Miyagi replied. "Do you think it had anything to do with that pulse?"

"Communications in the system were flatlined for seven seconds. At this point, it's possible, and in my mind it's very likely. Pull up all the files you have on it."

"Here it is. Obtained from an asteroid belt in the Epsilon Erdani system by a... Jacob Jiles. Made contact with an ONI stealth ship... the _Applebee_. Apparently he was the leader of some rebel faction that hid in the asteroid belt when the Eridanus colony was destroyed."

"You mean glassed?"

"No, Eridanus II is a gas giant. The colony was on the back of a gas mine in orbit, a repair-refit station retrofitted with a protective dome. It was something to see. They'd send smaller ships down to skim through the atmosphere and scoop up whatever gasses or trace minerals it was they were collecting there. Covies shot it down 22 years ago. No survivors."

"I see. And the artifact?"

"A _Chiroptera_-class vessel under the command of this Jiles guy made contact with the ONI vessel. Made a trade. They gave up the artifact in exchange fora couple of generators."

"Anyone besides Darcy work on this?"

"I don't think so, no. You may have noticed that the facility's awfully big for a staff of five people. We're just a skeleton crew. You've got the monitor for the slipspace probes, the net administrator... people whose jobs keep them here. Everyone else is at the dig site."

Murdock went rigid. "What?"

"The dig. The... whatever it is that they found quarrying out of town..." Miyagi trailed off and cringed, realizing how much he had just spilled through idle conversation.

Murdock reacted as if he had been slapped. "That's on _Coral? _Did _nobody_ think I ought to know that?"

# # # # # # #

"Shit, I fold," Jim Stensland sulked. The ODST threw the playing cards, stained by gunpower, oil, and God-knew what else, face-down on the collapsable table. PFC Maria Cortez grinned viciously at the only remaining player, an ONI spook named Travis Schnaidt.

"I match your five hundred," Schnaidt said quietly, "and I raise you one thousand."

The soldiers, technicians, and mechanics around the table hooted.

"He's gotta be bluffin', man," Stensland said.

"Think you can just walk in here and walk out with the paychecks of a couple of us ground-pounders, huh?" Cortez said.

"I have my motives. And yeah, the main one is money." More hoots. Cortez didn't like ONI spooks as a rule. They were either painfully blunt or viciously secretive, and both traits annoyed the hell out of her. The guy would learn soon enough, though.

"Call," she said. She tossed ten blue chips on top of the sizeable pile. There was probably five grand there.

The spook laid his cards face-up on the table. Two queens, three kings. Full house.

Cortez made a thin-lipped smile and slapped down her cards. Straight flush. Cheers went up from the others as Cortez swept in the chips, despite the fact that most of the money was theirs. The spook had lost, and that was all that mattered. ONI spooks _never_ lost.

"Want to go again?" Cortez asked, handing Schnaidt the deck. He looked at the chips in front of him. Significantly fewer, but enough.

"I'm game," he said, shuffling the deck. Eight players anted in, crowding around the table. Schnaidt began dealing the cards, but Cortez grabbed his wrist. He was surprised by the strength of the woman's grip.

"Try again," she said, "and this time from the _top_ of the deck."

The other players made their various reaction noises. Schnaidt cursed under his breath and began shuffling the cards again. The woman had cost him nearly a week's pay already, but what was he supposed to do? Accuse her of cheating better than him? That seemed to be the real game around here. He distinctly remembered dealing the nine of clubs to one of the ODSTs, but it had ended up in her straight flush. The hell with it. She was _not_ going to beat him again. He began dealing the cards around, greedy hands snatching them up and trying to hide them from the others in the confined space around the table.

"Last to lose names the rules," Stensland said. "And, on a personal note, you might want to stick away from five-card draw. It ain't treating you too kindly."

Schnaidt glared as the others laughed.

"If that's the way you want it," he said, "Texas hold-em this time."

The base alarm went off.

The card game instantly forgotten, the temporary hab capsule the group was playing in quickly emptied, with the Marines grabbing their weapons on the way out the door. Cortez clicked off the safety of her BR55, setting the weapon to full-auto. No immediate threat was in sight, but the entire compound was a flurry of activity. Warthogs sped here and there, carrying equipment and technicians. She planned to meet with the rest of her squad, but Schnaidt intercepted her near the motor pool.

"Private," he said, "listen to me."

"What's going on?"

"Listen! I just got word on my palmtop. There's been a contact in slipspace, multiple signals-"

"Just tell me!"

"They're here."

# # # # # # #

The implications were beginning to sink in. The Covenant prisoners had been found on Coral. They hadn't even been moved to a base on a different planet. That meant the Covenant knew where Coral was, but... no evacuation notice had been posted so as to keep the capture under wraps. The rest of their forces could arrive here at any time without warning, and all the while Section III planned to do nothing about it. Something they were working on was so secret that they didn't want to risk exposing it by moving the prisoners or posting an evacuation... the crystal, perhaps?

Whatever it was, there would be hell to pay for this.

Joshua Murdock stood up from the table and walked out of the room when the base alarm went off. He sprinted down the hall and almost ran into Laura Conners.

"What the hell's going on?"

"The covies are here! They just showed up! One scan and the slipstream was empty, the next scan-"

Murdock cut around her and ran towards Communications.

# # # # # # #

The Fleet of Persistent Regret had exited slipspace ready for a fight, with weapons fully charged and Seraph fighters exiting their launch bays seconds after entering normal space, but they found no significant resistance. Fleetmaster Aya 'Daulanee thought this odd. No carriers, none of the devestating orbital platforms that had been so effective at Reach. He did not know what to believe. There was negligable military presence here, but somehow, three of his ships had vanished here without a trace.

"Navigations, report," he said.

"I see nothing out of the ordinary, my lord," the puzzled navigator replied. "There is no debris from our ships, no unusual energy signatures, and only two dozen human ships. A scan has shown only one point of interest on the planet itself."

"See to their fleet's destruction," 'Daulanee said. With two dozen human ships against his thirty, the battle was sure to end quickly. Then he would wait for word of what to do with the planet itself.

# # # # # # #

ONI Captain Derek Krist's mouth fell open at the sight. Over two dozen Covenant ships, including a flagship and numerous assault carriers, emerged from slipspace in perfect formation, obviously looking for a fight. The ONI stealth ship _Applebee_, which he was commanding, was utterly unarmed and stood no chance against the Covenant fleet.

"Uh... sir? Sir! What are we going to do?"

"The fleet is preparing to engage! Your orders?"

Krist found his chair and eased himself into it. Twenty-three UNSC cruisers and destroyers formed an attack formation in a futile gesture of defiance, a suicidal attempt to save Coral. A volley of hundreds of Archer missiles exploded uselessly against the silver shields of the Covenant ships. Three UNSC vessels were destroyed before the capacitors for their MAC cannons could even charge.

"Sir! Your orders!" the ensign shouted.

"Initiate Cole protocol and get us the hell out of here!"

The ensign's face went from fear to shame. He saw the action as cowardly, but he was under direct orders. The ship's computer downloaded a viral data scavenger that would erase navigational information that could lead the Covenant to other colonies. Meanwhile, the UNSC fleet fired its volley of MAC rounds, concentrating all of their firepower on the Covenant flagship. The small MAC rounds didn't even succeed in lowering the flagship's shields. The fleet began evasive maneuvers as the Covenant poured fire into them, but they had nowhere to go. One by one, the UNSC ships were hit with plasma which took up to a minute to eat through the ships' hulls, and all the while the _Applebee_ drifted, pretending to be a hole in space.

The Covenant fleet poured fire into the debris, and Krist sucked in a deep breath. They apparently hadn't been noticed... yet.

"Cole protocol almost complete. We're almost ready to jump."

Krist realized that the jump would leave a detectable hole in slipspace and that they would most likely be pursued, but with luck, the Covenant would be preoccupied with Coral and leave him alone.

"Contact Alpha is scanning us! Contact Alpha locking on!"

Krist blanched. He typed navigation coordinates into the ship's computer, but received a message reading "Cole Protocol Violation: Purge In Progress."

"Contact Alpha has fired it's main weapon!"

"Evasive-"

The plasma impacted the _Applebee_'s thin titanium hull and incinerated the ship before he could finish his sentence.

# # # # # # #

"The Covenant is here, they're likely going to glass the planet," Schnaidt said.

"But..."

"Private, take that warthog to the research headquarters and pick up Esko Korpijaakko. That's _Esko Korpijaakko. _Take him to Hall of the Mountain King. He'll show you the way."

"But..."

"That's an _order_, private! I have work to do here! Now _move_!"

Cortez jumped in the driver seat of the warthog, tossing her BR55 in the passenger seat, and gunned the engine. The tires kicked up a cloud of dust before they caught and the vehicle jumped forward. She swerved to avoid another Warthog and floored the accellerator. The research headquarters was on the other side of the compound, which was split down the middle by the dig site. She crossed the temporary instacrete bridge over the 10- by 80-meter rut that had been dug up and turned to drive parallel to the artifact, looking at it as she passed. The artifact was apparently the ceiling of some sort of tunnel complex, and the reflection it made in the sunlight didn't seem to match the position of the sun. The ornate grooves cut into it flared past her as she drove along the instacrete road, past a row of portable generators and communications equipment. She ground to a halt in front of the research center. Dozens of people sporting security passes and wearing civilian clothes were milling around the hab pod, looking confused. Dammit, what the hell was that guy's name?

"Doctor," she shouted. "Doctor Korpi... Korpi... Esko? Is Esko here?"

A dark-skinned man in his early thirties jogged over to her.

"Korpijaakko? I am him," he replied. His voice had a peculiar accent that Cortez couldn't place right away.

"Get in!"

The doctor hopped into the passenger seat of the warthog and Cortez peeled out, pulling away before the doctor was truly seated. She drove the warthog through the gates before the sentry could stop her, now moving due east along the road towards the city.

"Where are you taking me?" the doctor asked. "What is going on?"

"The planet's about to be glassed, that's what!" Cortez shouted. "Where the hell is the Hall of the Mountain King?"

"My God..."

"Hall of the Mountain King? Where is it?"

"It's... go into the city. Near 94th and Atiph street, a commercial building. Perfect cube. Black windows."

# # # # # # #

Murdock punched his code into the door of communications. It didn't open. He slowed down and typed it again. No change.

_"Dammit, open this door!"_ he shouted. The door opened three seconds later and Murdock came face to face with Michael Jones.

"Where were you?"

Jones stammered for a moment. Murdock shoved past him and began typing furiously at one of the consoles as Jones slipped out the door.

**SENDID: .ueg  
****DESTID: .ueg  
****SUBJECT: COVIE POWS / SECTION ZERO FINDINGS**

Few details cimpiled. HOMK/Ackerson conduvting illegit ops. Unreported covie(?) ardifact/crystal/monolithd iscovered/activated(?), created shockwave/anomaly. Revealed Coral to the Covenant(?). Fleet detroyed. Glassing imminent. Enclosd record of findngs, incomplete.

**Video of interrogation sessions encrypted/enclosed # # # # #  
HOMK raw data/official report (draft) encrypted/enclosed # # # # #**

Many spelling errors littered the report. It came across as very rushed... unprofessional. At this point, Murdock didn't give a damn. He had more important things to tend to than reporting evidence for an investigation that would never take place now. He sent the encrypted slipstream packet. His mission accomplished, he opened up his personal phone book. He looked through the alphabetically-arranged names, mentally filtering out those who weren't family. Sweet Jesus. Kyle, his brother... he had no chance. Too far away, in another city. Him, his wife, their two-year-old daughter...

Murdock forced his eyes further down the list. His parents lived on a farm two hundred miles south of the facility. _Too far!_

Julia. His fiancee was only seven miles off. He dialed on the computer and leaned over the microphone.

"Honey? Jules, are you there?" he said urgently.

"Yes, what is it? My God, Matthew, what happened? You sound-"

"I need you to come to 94th and Atiph _right away_. You have to do it, right now, do you hear me?"

"What is going on?"

"It's the Covenant, Julia. They're here."

"Oh, my..." Sirens sounded in the background, low, mournful sirens that had never before sounded and never would again. "Oh, my God."

# # # # # # #

Fleetmaster Aya 'Daulanee received High Charity's response quickly, and it was exactly what he had expected. The last of the human resistance had folded quickly, and now the fleet could begin its work. He spoke the order and the Fleet of Persistent Regret began to map out the surface of Coral along lines of latitude and longitude.

The entire planet would then be bombarded with plasma until there was nothing left alive.

'Daulanee felt a pang of emotion, looking upon the planet. The humans were despicable creatures, yes, that deserved to be eradicated, but still... was this degree of overkill truly necessary?

His fleet began to approach the equator of the planet, where the process would begin. 'Daulanee looked upon the blue-green ball of Coral in a new way. The planet was beautiful. Swirling white clouds arced over the calm, vast oceans of the world. From orbit, one could see deserts, vast forests, icy plains, lakes, and mountain ranges. Soon, he knew, it would all be gone, replaced by a sea of glass and molten rock from which nothing would ever grow again. He had done it before, on Reach, on Troy, and on Harmony, but it was never enjoyable to watch as nature's beauty was replaced with something utterly unnatural.

And there were cities. Vast cities that covered much of the planet's surface as gray patches, like mold on a piece of food. Such was the disease he was to rid this world of, but here there were so _many!_ This world was home to far more humans than any world the Covenant had yet encountered. Could it be their homeworld? No. Surely no. They would surely have defenses hundreds of times more powerful than these around their home planet. But that was a battle for another day, one that he looked forward to, and would eventually participate in.

There was no time for regrets, and he would not second-guess the Hierarchs. He gazed upon Coral for the last time, and spoke the command.

Covenant ships, from the equator to the poles, began saturating the world in liquid fire.

Coral began to die.

# # # # # # #

Esko Korpijaakko looked to the horizon in horror. In the far-off distance, slow moving blue-white streaks of plasma arced down from the sky, the ships that launched them hidden by the glare of the setting sun. He crossed himself, whispering in Latin. Cortez didn't even look up. The Warthog plowed down the road at breakneck speeds, but it seemed infuriatingly slow to her. There was no traffic in either direction, but the city was only a mile away. Word had spread quickly.

Esko watched the string of plasma bombs fall out of sight on the horizon, hidden one-by-one behind the mountains. The impacts created a constant, thunder-like rumbling. The direction of the wind shifted away from the mountains at at least thirty miles an hour as the heat forced the air to rapidly expand, and the air was several degrees warmer. The line of plasma bombs continued from one horizon to the next, proceeding far faster than the warthog, but in the distance, the next wave was appearing, closer than before. They were running out of time.

# # # # # # #

"Where are you?" Joshua asked.

"I'm half a mile out," Julia replied, remarkably calm. "The train just stopped. Everyone's getting off, including the operator. I'm going on foot. I'm-"

A scream sounded over the chatter.

"Julia!"

"I'm fine! I'm okay! Someone just threw himself off a roof! It's crazy out here! I'm running now... where do I need to go?"

"94th and Atiph, there's a big building shaped like a cube, all black windows. Go in the underground garage, and there's elevators. Second one to the right. Hit the 'basement' button. I'll take care of authorizating it. You can do it, honey, I know you can."

# # # # # # #

The warthog entered the city limits, turning down side streets that were filled with crashed and abandoned cars. Cortez looked constantly at street signs and grid references, at first trying to avoid civilian vehicles. A series of muffled _whumphs_ echoed through the streets, barely audible over the sirens. The winds were now at least forty miles an hour, whipping between the crumbling lower-class buildings. Signs flashing "Evacuation Alert" were everywhere, but the civilians had nowhere to go. Many huddled inside buildings, more tried to flood into the subway system. Any panicked, last-ditch idea that could lead to survival was being exploited, but none of these people had long to live. Some were actually _looting_. Cortez drove the warthog over the tops of the since-abandoned civilian vehicles in the trash-littered street as the _whumphs_ grew steadily louder.

# # # # # # #

Stensland stopped what he was doing and looked to the horizon. A string of plasma bombs was again dropping in utter silence, but these were on their latitude. Death was approaching.

_The covies_, he thought. _Don't even give us a chance_._ Not a fucking chance!_

"Why don't you fight?" he screamed at the sky. "Why don't you fight! We're right here! Wide-awake and physical! You _fucking cowards!_"

He drew his M6C and began shooting randomly in the air, heaving the empty pistol into the air as its clip was depleted and sinking to his knees in defeat. Stepping through the grass, Travis Schnaidt placed a steady hand on the ODST's shoulder, and he looked up.

"You're a brave man," Schnaidt said, "and that makes you their superior. Remember that."

Stensland paused, drawing heavy breaths, and watched as the waves of plasma approached, destroying all in their path. He turned and faced Schnaidt, remembering something. He reached into his right sleeve... and pulled out the nine of clubs.

The men laughed voraciously.

# # # # # # #

Sweat broke out on Esko's forehead from the temperature, now in the upper nineties. Both gasped for breath in the now ozone-rich atmosphere.

"We're a block away," Cortez shouted, wiping her face.

"Left! Go left!"

The warthog careened around a corner, two tires hopping up on the curb. Civilians jumped out of the way and continued running aimlessly. Cortez saw a red blotch on the exterior of a building where a man with an M6 had decided to end his own life, watched in horror as a young woman picked the gun up off the street and followed suit. Mere feet away, a terrified child stood and watched. The sound of the plasma bombs was growing quieter as the ships dropping them moved off into the horizon, but that meant the next wave was coming, the one that would hit the city, and it was coming _fast_.

The building was there. Cortez slammed into the gate, the warthog completely destroying it. She pulled into the underground garage and the two jumped out a second after the vehicle crashed.

# # # # # # #

"I'm at the main gate," Julia said. "It's been broken down."

"Good, good!" Joshua half-shouted. His console changed to show a security camera in the garage, facing the elevators. "You're almost home! Just go into the garage, it's right there! I'm working on the authorization!"

He turned, his eyes passing over a cup of coffee. Increasingly strong ripples played across its surface. He looked to the other console, showing elevator control.

"I'm in the garage," Julia said, "The elevator..."

Joshua stared at the display in mute horror.

"...it's in use!"

# # # # # # #

Cortez gasped deep breaths, leaning against the wall of the elevator. Korpijaakko was standing, his access card still pressed tightly against the camoflaged panel that read it. He coughed once and turned to the private.

"Thank you, thank God for you," he said. "My wife, my son, he's only four. He wouldn't have understood."

Cortez didn't reply. Her thoughts were with those on the surface who had already died, and those who were still going to. _Why me?_ she thought. _Why do _I_ survive when everyone else dies?_

# # # # # # #

"No, no! This can't be happening!" Joshua shouted. He typed frantically at the console.

"Matthew..."

"I think I can stop it! I think I can save you!"

"Matthew, it's all right," she said calmly. "It's all right."

He stopped typing at the console.

"You did everything you could. You did. You saved me."

"Oh, my God..."

"It'll be all right, it's all OK. Those people in the elevator... keep them safe. Do that for me."

Joshua looked at the elevator control display, watching the elevator's progress down the 250 meter-long shaft. The plasma could still reach down the shaft, destroying the elevator and the facility. A button marked 'lockdown' flashed on the display. The button that could save the facility. The button that would condemn his fiancee to death.

"Do it, Matthew," she said.

The elevator passed the safe level and Joshua forced his hand to push the button.

# # # # # # #

Twenty meters above the elevator, ceramic-titanium gates four meters thick slammed shut on the elevator cable. The elevator came to a crunching halt, throwing Cortez and Korpijaakko to the floor. The gates soon severed the cable, and the elevator was in free-fall for about ten meters before its emergency brakes kicked in and brought it squealing to a stop. Its counterweight's cable was also severed, however, sending the counterweight crashing down one hundred and ninety meters to the bottom of the shaft. It crushed a circuit breaker at the bottom, plunging the elevator's jostled occupants into darkness. Above them, a water main opened and water began filling the rest of the shaft, pooling above the closed lockdown doors and -- hopefully -- serving as a heatsink, but also blocking the only possible exit from the facility.

The Hall of the Mountain King was a chaotic mess of winding tunnels and rooms built 250 meters underground with only one shaft leading to the surface. Constructed before the discovery of the Covenant by a crackpot separatist group, abandoned, and later reopened and modified by the Office of Naval Intelligence, it was built to withstand a direct hit from a 180-megaton nuclear warhead. It was about to be put to the ultimate test.

# # # # # # #

The ground began to shake, first light tremors, but increasingly violent, in steady pounding rhythms. Joshua looked at the low-resolution image of his fiancee standing outside the elevator door in the garage, a quarter of a kilometer overhead. He gently touched the screen as she looked up at the camera.

"I love you, Julia," Joshua said. "I always will."

"I love you too."

# # # # # # #

A series of _thuds _rocked the entire facility, growing in strength until it was a single continuous roar. In the elevator, effectively jammed in its shaft, Cortez and Korpijaakko screamed and covered their ears in the stiff darkness. Michael Jones braced himself in a doorway as he had learned to from Californian earthquakes. Keom 'Yerumee closed his eyes, waiting for his glimpse of paradise. Tyler Blancett sat on a metal chair, staring coldly at the cells as the lights failed. In the Core, Yuji Miyagi's sweating hands tightly gripped the console in front of him and he stared at the ceiling. Laura Conners knelt at her cot and quickly ran a rosary through her hands, whispering a desparate prayer. Joshua Murdock stared through tears as the feed from the camera in the garage was cut off.

The lights flickered, the ground jumped underfoot, and an earth-shattering _thud _tore through the facility, leaving everyone's ears ringing and throwing equipment to the floor.

The lights came back on. The vibrations grew less violent as the wave passed.

Hours had yet to pass before the Covenant's work would be complete. But to those who remained, Coral was already dead.


	4. Dust and Echoes

**Chapter Three:  
****Dust and Echoes**

_September 29, 2552  
__Day 1_

Murdock stared at the static on the screen with dead eyes, running a trembling hand across the monitor. He squeezed his eyes shut and crushed his palm against his forehead.

Gone. All gone. His wife, his family... gone. Murdered. Everyone he had had been stolen from him in one fell swoop. What more did he have to live for? To wander these tunnels as a ghost for years to come, forever trapped under a glassed planet? He looked down at his wrist, blue veins pulsing underneath. He could end it, here and now. He sat back in the chair, wiping tears off his face. Why had this happened? What had drawn the Covenant here? Why did they hate humanity? Why was this happening at all? Murdock was overwhelmed by the questions. He didn't want to think about them anymore. He just wanted to end it, to reunite with his fiancee and be freed of this hell he was consigned to. Murdock was not a religious man, but he found himself wishing the stories he had heard were true. Would he see her again when he died? Or would suicide condemn him to hell? Did either place exist? Could hell be much worse? He didn't know. Most of his life had been spent crawling out of the depths of hellish poverty, fighting to survive the street gangs and petty thugs of Coral without joining them. He had willed himself through his own education, excelled up until he had been discovered by ONI. Away from Coral, he had risen through positions quickly, ultimately working his way into Section Zero, the prestigious Department of Internal Affairs.

Then he had met Julia. For the first time in his life, everything had been falling into place... but then...

He held his head in his hands. It had all been for _nothing_. She was dead, and he was no better off. But he couldn't end it yet. He couldn't.

He looked back towards the unforgiving static of the severed video feed, his eyes passing over the elevator control display. He had made his fiancee a promise. He had promised to keep those people in that elevator safe. The people who, in attempts to escape their fates on the surface, had indirectly killed his fiancee. He couldn't stand for it. Had they deserved life more than Julia did? Why the hell should he help _them_? Murdock took a deep breath and tried to calm himself down.

He had made her a promise. He still had work to do.

Murdock gently set the combat knife down on the console and stood up, backing away from it. _Not yet._

# # # # # # #

They drew in quick, gasping breaths in the stiff, hot darkness. Cortez struggled to find it at first, but finally managed to activate her flashlight. She saw in the darkness a metal... _thing_... that had not been there moments before. The elevator's emergency lights came on, intermittently at first, but then steadily. Cortez looked in shock to see that the elevator had been skewered by a fallen steel girder. Esko let out a yelp of surprise when he saw that it had gone directly between his legs and easily could have taken off either one. He backed up against the elevator wall and pushed up it to his feet, breathing deep, gasping breaths. Cortez looked up at the computer display, which flashed 'E-BRAKE ENGAGED' along with other various warnings. Most of them were in small red text that she couldn't read through her bleary eyes, but soon she received all the warning she needed. The low groan of metal stress met her ears. The e-brake couldn't support the weight of the elevator _and_ the girder for long.

"Help me with this!" she shouted. Esko hesitated for a moment and then joined her in attempts to push the girder the rest of the way through the elevator. They strained against the weight of the girder, but it offered little to grip and it wouldn't budge. After about a half a minute they gave up trying to push it through the bottom of the elevator. They couldn't save the elevator. They had to get out.

Cortez looked up to see the hole it had made in the top of the elevator. It looked like it was almost big enough to fit through. She started to climb up the girder, and Esko soon understood, helping to push her up to the top of the girder. She tore the panel of the light fixture off of the ceiling, widening the hole, and poked her head out. It was pitch black in every direction, but she could hear the sizzling noise one associated with water dripping on something hot. She shone her flashlight straight overhead in the darkness. The elevator shaft above them had been sealed off with a titanium-A gate and boiling-hot water was dripping off of it, sizzling and evaporating once it landed on the top of the elevator. The gate was charred into an unhealthy color and warped from the intense heat, but it had somehow held. Cortez had no idea how long it _would_ hold, or if it would at all. If it didn't they'd be bathed in boiling water, to say nothing of what the conditions on the other side must have been. Ultimately, dead was dead, but the marine could think of better ways to go.

Cortez aimed the flashlight at the cable assembly on top of the elevator. The severed cable hung over the side, out of sight. Cortez pushed herself up on top of the elevator and crawled to the edge, hauling up the cable to see how long it was. She was disappointed. It certainly wasn't long enough to rappel all the way down.

"What have you found," Esko asked. Cortez wordlessly leaned back over the hole and helped to haul the scientist up and out of the elevator. He took a quick look at the cable, coiled on the top of the elevator. "It is seven, eight meters in length tops," he said. "Surely you do not intend to climb down it?"

"If we don't think of something else in the next few minutes," Cortez said, "we're going to have to try."

# # # # # # #

Murdock pried at the closed elevator door with his bare hands. The doors didn't budge. He cursed under his breath and rubbed his hands together, preparing to try again, but he heard footsteps behind him.

"What are you doing?" Michael Jones asked.

Murdock turned around. "There's at least one person stuck in the elevator," he said. "Give me a hand with this."

Jones ran over to the elevator door. He inserted a key into the elevator's controls and turned it. The hydraulics holding the door shut deactivated. Murdock and Jones each took hold of a door and pulled them apart, revealing the open elevator shaft inside. Murdock could see drops of water falling in the shaft, either condensation or, worse, a leak. He could hear the drops landing in water at the bottom of the shaft. He stuck his head into the shaft and looked on both sides of the door. The walls of the shaft were plated with titanium-A and would offer no purchase to someone who tried to climb down the shaft. He half-expected to see a ladder leading up the inside of the shaft, but there was none. It made sense: why have a ladder to the facility if the elevator was meant to be the only way in? All he could see that could possibly be used was the cable that had run from the counterweight to the top of the shaft and down to the elevator. It had been severed by the closing gate, but since he could see it, it obviously hadn't fallen to the bottom of the shaft. The severed end was looped over a girder somewhere further up the shaft, and the tip hung on roughly the same level as the door Murdock was looking out of.

"Do you see anyone?" Jones asked. Murdock looked up. There was a single flashlight shining around on the top of the elevator, wedged in the shaft by its emergency brakes.

"One person," he said. He realized that while he had not lost his anger towards that person, he no longer toyed with the idea of leaving them. Somehow, seeing them made it seem real. "We need something to hook onto that cable, pull the end over here. They can slide down it, and if we hold onto it tight enough, they'll land safely in the corridor."

"I think I know just the thing," Jones said.

# # # # # # #

Cortez tossed the cable off of the top of the elevator. It unspooled for about eight meters before snapping taut, still connected to the top of the elevator. She swung her legs over the edge and began to climb down, letting go of Esko's hand to grip the oily cable. She slid down about two meters before she clamped her boots against the bottom rim of the outside of the elevator, stopping her fall. Breathing a sigh of relief, she slowly rappelled down the side of the elevator until it finally slipped away from her. Hanging near the end of the cable, she shone her flashlight up at the bottom of the elevator. The girder was there, with a six-foot-long section sticking out of the bottom.

_Fourteen feet of steel_, she thought. It had to weigh nearly two thousand pounds. She was surprised the elevator was still there.

She lowered herself further into the darkness. Reaching the end of the cable, she shone her flashlight around. The elevator shaft was composed of titanium-A, and looked too smooth to grip onto. There was no way to climb down, unless...

Cortez shone the flashlight at the wall opposite the elevator. There, draped over another girder, was the rest of the elevator cable. It must have been connected to the counterweight. Looking down, she saw light spilling into the shaft from below. Shadows played along the wall... could there be someone there? She tightened her grip on the cable and called into the darkness.

"Hey! Is anyone there?"

Murdock looked up into the elevator shaft.

"Yeah," he shouted, "there's two of us. We're going to help you. How many people are up there?"

"Two," Cortez shouted, swinging at the end of the cable. Murdock could see the flashlight, but nothing else.

"Can you reach the counterweight cable?" he asked.

Cortez gasped as she slipped a few more inches down her cable. It was just too greasy to hold. "Give me a second," she said. She looked at the counterweight's cable, draped over the girder. She wished she could have hooked it on something. The scope of her BR55 came to mind, but she realized she had left it in the warthog up on the surface. She only had one other choice. Slowly, carefully, she began swinging on the cable.

Murdock watched from below as the flashlight bobbed back and forth like a pendulum. Cortez tightened her grip on the greasy elevator cable, scared to let go of it, but she would have to hold onto it with one hand in order to grab onto the other cable. She was coming dangerously close to the walls of the shaft now, swinging dangerously fast. Taking a deep breath, she swung towards the counterweight's cable and let go of the swinging cable with one hand, grabbing the counterweight's cable. As she swung away from the girder, the counterweight's cable slipped out of her hand like a spaghetti noodle. She dropped another foot on the swinging cable before she gripped it again with both hands, exhaling sharply and squeezing her eyes shut.

The section of the counterweight's cable that was dangling in front of the door shook violently and rose two feet. Murdock looked up at the dancing, spinning flashlight, half-expecting for its wearer to come plunging down the shaft. Hearing footsteps behind him, Murdock turned to see Jones approaching with a ten-foot aluminum ladder. On its feet were two rubber 'shoes' that provided traction and kept the ladder from sliding out from under its user. They could be used to hook the end of the counterweight cable.

"That's good," Murdock said. "That's _perfect._"

The two men held on the ladder and cautiously extended it across the shaft. This was lost on Cortez, who had managed to stop her spin and her swing by grabbing onto the girder sticking out of the bottom of the elevator. She was now glad that it was firmly embedded in the elevator, and not sliding out from under her. Again, she heard the groan of metal from the elevator's brakes. They wouldn't be able to hold much longer. She would have to try again soon, and then somehow they would have to bring Esko down the same way.

"Forward, forward... good, now left... got it! Okay, let's reel it in!" Jones said. The two men withdrew the ladder from the shaft. Murdock grabbed the end of the counterweight's cable and pulled it into the corridor. They dropped the ladder and took hold of the greasy cable. Murdock called up the elevator again.

"We're ready when you are," he said. "Slide down the cable one at a time."

Cortez looked down the shaft, then to the cable looped over the girder. She tightened her grip on her cable and jumped off, swinging in a perfect arc. She let go of the elevator cable with both hands, grabbing hold of the counterweight cable and sliding down ten meters of the cable before slowing to a stop. Murdock and Jones were pulled forward by the cable towards the open elevator shaft, but managed not to fall in. The dug their feet into the deck and pulled the cable further into the corridor.

"Damn," Jones said. "What'd they do, _jump _to it?"

Murdock called into the shaft again. "You alright?"

Cortez took several deep breaths. "I'm fine," she called back. "I'm going to lower myself down to you." She began sliding down at a steady pace. The private looked back up the shaft and called into the darkness. "Esko? Climb down the cable on my mark. You're going to have to jump from one cable to the other."

A sound echoed up the shaft, from somewhere below the open door. She couldn't be sure, but it sounded like the thump of a single gunshot.

"Hold it steady," Murdock said. Jones had obviously spent too much time in the break room and not enough in the gym.

"You do your job," Jones said, "I'll do my job."

Jones' watch chirped. Murdock felt the line in his hands go slightly slack.

"What are you-"

"Shit," Jones said, "shit!"

He let go of the line altogether, turning and running towards the communications center. Murdock, now holding the slick cable on his own, began to be pulled forward. The line began to slip through his grasp.

"Jones!" Murdock shouted. "_JONES!_"

The man turned a corner in the corridor and vanished. Murdock leaned against the cable, tightening his grip. His palms pressed through the grease and the sliding cable began to cut his hands. The cable stopped slipping through his hands and instead began to drag him forward. Murdock dug his feet into the deck and somehow came to a stop, inches from being pulled into the shaft. He looked up the shaft. Cortez was now close enough that he could see her silhouette. She slid down the rest of the cable and planted her feet on the deck, safely inside the corridor. The weight on the cable alleviated, Murdock no longer had to worry about it slipping out of his hands or pulling him into the abyss. Cortez looked at the greasy, tired man that had just saved her life. She didn't know why, but she felt that he was angry with her.

_So,_ Murdock thought, _this is the person who took the elevator, leaving Julia to die_. He shook his head. He couldn't afford to think like that at the moment. There was still another person on the elevator.

"Grab that cable," he said. The marine wrapped her leather gloves around the section of the cable that Jones had abandoned. Murdock wiped the grease and blood on his hands off on his pants and gripped the cable again. One more to go.

"Esko," Cortez shouted, "we're ready for you!"

The line was again tugged forward as the man's weight was added to the line. Esko began lowering himself down the cable. Murdock was surprised that the woman was stronger than Jones had been, the benefits of military training. Esko was lowered to the corridor with little excitement, though the man was clearly shaken by the ordeal. Murdock and Cortez let go of the cable, and not a moment too soon. The elevator's emergency brakes failed, metal twisted on itself, and the elevator plunged past the open door to the shaft. It passed the door in less than a second's time, sounding like a freight train. It hit the cable as it passed the door, whipping it out through the gap with enough force that the cable could have easily removed any arms or legs that were in its path. Esko turned around, terrified, as the cable suddenly disappeared into the shaft. Moments later, the elevator slammed girder and all into the bottom of the shaft.

Murdock looked at the two people whose lives he had saved for a moment, then turning and walking away without saying a word. He had nothing to say to them. He had fulfilled his promise, and now he wanted nothing more to do with them.

But he _would_ have something to say to Michael Jones.

# # # # # # #

Jones vaulted through the door the instant it opened. He braced his impact against the console in the closet-sized room and lifted the plate off of the numerical keypad. His watch chimed again, now on the last fifteen seconds of the countdown. He paused a moment, remembering the four-digit code, and carefully entered it into the numberical keypad with seven seconds left on the clock. A moment passed, and his chronometer counted back up. He breathed a heavy sigh and wiped the sweat off his forehead. He had no idea what would actually happen if the timer ever hit zero. What he _did_ remember was Colonel Ackerson's warning about it:

There was a reason it was called a "Dead Man's Switch."

He lowered the faceplate, covering the keypad again and turning to leave. The entire communications center was an elevator, and the room silently rose back up one level. Jones opened the door again and came face-to-face with Joshua Murdock.

"No," Jones said, nervously. Murdock stepped forward as Jones walked backwards away from him. "No!"

Jones turned, but there was nowhere to run. Murdock grabbed him by the lapels and slammed him into the control board, less than a foot from the monitor that still showed the static from the video feed in the parking garage.

"Where were you?" Murdock spat. His face was contorted with rage.

"I- I- I can't say..." Jones stuttered. "I'm not supposed to tell."

Murdock picked up the combat knife he had left on the console and brought it dangerously close to the technician's face.

"You endangered the lives of three people by running away. _What were you doing?_"

"There's a- there's a switch... a code... every five hours and f- forty five minutes, then again in fifteen minutes... every day, eight times a day..."

"Dead man's switch?"

"Y- yeah."

Murdock took the knife away from Jones' neck.

"What does it do?"

"I don't know."

"_Damn you, what does it do?_"

"_I don't know!_"

Murdock brought the knife down, stabbing it into the wooden console. It stayed standing in the wood when he brought his hand away. He let Jones up, who quickly ran out of the room. Murdock sat on the console, between the knife and the monitor, and place a hand on his forehead.

"Got a minute?"

Murdock looked up to see Cortez standing in the doorway with her arms folded across her chest. Murdock shrugged. Cortez stepped into the room and pulled the swivel chair towards her, sitting down.

"After someone saves your life, you're supposed to thank them," she said. "But you don't want anything to do with us. Why?"

Murdock leaned forward, shaking his head. He chuckled a little. What the hell.

"All right," he said. "I'll tell you. Let me give you the grand tour. This," he gestured towards the monitor displaying static, "is Camera Seven. It's the video feed of the elevators in the parking garage of the building that used to be above us, specifically the elevator you came down in. You got into the elevator, and you got down here safe and sound, but in doing so _my fiancee was locked out_."

Cortez stared mutely.

"I sat here, in that chair you're in right now," Murdock said. "I sat here, and guided her to that garage. I brought her here to save her life, but when she got here the elevator was being used, so she was locked out. I sat here and watched, talking to her over the chatter until the feed was cut off. I talked to her until she-"

Murdock sat back on the console and covered his face with a hand. Cortez looked at the knife embedded in the console, finally understanding the rest of the story. If he _had_ killed himself, she and Esko would be dead at the bottom of the elevator shaft. It must have taken a huge effort of will for the man to do what he did. She thought for a moment. What she said next could determine whether the man would live for another fifteen minutes.

She hesitated for a moment before speaking. Would he be better off if he just ended it? He was clearly miserable.

_No_, she thought. _He saved my life. I've got to try to save his._

"If you hadn't done what you did," she said, "I wouldn't be here now. Thank you."

"For what?" Murdock asked. "We're buried alive under a glassed planet. We have food and water and air to last a lifetime, but what's the point?"

Cortez finally realized why he hadn't gone through with it: He had had a job to do, checking the elevator for survivors.

As long as he had a job to do, he would put this off, and as time went by he would be able to make up his mind about it with a clear head. Ultimately, though, if he was going to commit suicide he was going to do it.

"What do they do here?" she asked. Murdock hesitated a moment. Here he was, the interrogator being interrogated. But the question was in his mind now. What had these people done?

They had killed the planet, he realized. The pulse generated by that crystal had to have revealed Coral to the Covenant. It _had_ to have. The timing was too perfect to be a coincidence. Ackerson had hidden it here. He hadn't reported it to Section Three. He tried to hide it from Section Zero. Someone or something had activated it and made Coral glow like a torch to the Covenant.

_Where had the crystal come from?_ he thought.

_That's right. Miyagi said Eridanus rebels from the Epsilon Erdani system found it and gave it to the captain of the ONI prowler _Applebee But something was wrong with that... something Miyagi had said. A slip of the tongue, really. Thinking for a moment, he realized what was wrong. How could he have missed it before? It was so _obvious!_ Murdock raked his hand across his head in frustration, groaning.

"What?" Cortez asked.

Murdock looked up.

"Epsilon Erdani," he said. He stood to leave.

"Wait a second," Cortez said. "Am I supposed to know what that means, or am I supposed to guess?"

"There's an artifact... a crystal that they've been studying here. Some Covenant super-weapon or something, but I don't think it's Covenant. They said it was recovered by a group of rebels living in an asteroid belt near Eridanus, that it was traded with an ONI prowler called the _Applebee_, but he said the belt was in the Epsilon Erdani system."

"So?"

"Eridanus is not _in_ the Epsilon Erdani system. Reach is."

Cortez stared blankly for a moment before her jaw dropped. "This is about the _Applebee_? Are you saying that ship came from Reach? That it survived when the Covenant attacked, passed through the Eridanus system, and ended up here? What were they doing?"

"I don't know, but I'm going to find out. Quincy," he called, "give me everything you have on the _Applebee_."

A moment's pause. The AI's behavior had been very strange, almost like AI rampancy. But that was impossible, wasn't it? Quincy was only two years old. Smart AI's didn't go rampant until age seven. An electronic voice, not even remotely human, reverberated out of the computer console.

"Why?"

"Section Zero override, jackass," Murdock said. The insult did nothing to sway the AI's decision-making, but Murdock needed the release. The AI executed the request after a few seconds, and new data appeared on the console. Cortez stepped forward to look over his shoulder.

The search yielded a single file, labeled 'OPERATION HYPODERMIC.' Murdock opened it. Inside there was two files. One was a personnel file called 'Coalminer'. It was little more than a shell, containing a single contact address for a man named John Doe.

The other file was labeled 'HOMK'. Hall of the Mountain King.

Here.

# # # # # # #

The others were grouped in the cafeteria. Nobody had said anything. Everyone was shaken by what had happened. They had lost colleagues and coworkers when the planet was glassed and now looked to each other for support, but there was little to be said. The severity of the situation was beginning to sink in for some, but others tried to pose more promising scenarios.

"We'll be all right," Esko Korpijaakko said. "The atmosphere will boil away in a few weeks, the surface will cool down and we'll be able to go on the surface in regular environment suits. We can signal for help."

Jones slammed his fists against the table he sat on. "_We're not getting out of here, dammit!_"

Everyone stared.

"Think... just _think_ for a moment, will you? Coral has been _glassed_. The surface temperature will be around seven hundred degrees celsius. There's going to be increased seismic activity, increased volcanic activity, that on top of the fact that a lot of the planet's surface is molten right now. That heat isn't just going to go away. They hit every square inch of the planet, _including_ the oceans, which means that they've been boiled away. But that's not all. The plasma was hot enough to crack most of that water into its component atoms. The molecular bonds were severed. The hydrogen is light enough to float away from Coral. The oxygen isn't. Regardless of what's happened to the surface, Coral's gravity hasn't changed. The atmosphere isn't just going to 'boil away.' It's actually going to be many times _denser_."

Miyagi sighed. "Just... give us the rundown."

"What I'm saying is that the surface of Coral is about as hostile as Venus on a bad day," Jones said. "The surface alone is extremely hot. On top of that, factor in that the atmosphere has become a greenhouse _oven_, so it's going to stay that way. Then, factor in that the atmosphere is mostly composed of a very flammable, very toxic, and _very_ corrosive gas. Bottom line... we're not getting off this planet alive."

Conners cocked an eye. "But isn't the thermal energy in the atmosphere great enough that the atmosphere would _have_ to break away? I think your estimate of seven hundred degrees is too conservative."

"No other planet the Covenant has glassed has had as much water. That's got to play hell with the precedent," Jones said.

"Yeah, but wouldn't the plasma ignite the hydrogen and oxygen as soon as the molecular bonds were broken?"

"Look," Jones said, "whatever it's like up there, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't survive it."

Tyler Blancett ran into the room, clutching his left hand. There was a crude dressing wrapped around it, torn from his shirt.

"The jackal fucking _bit_ me!" he shouted. "The fucking vulture _bit _me!"

"You have a jackal here?" Esko asked, confused.

"Oh, my God," Laura Conners said. God only knew what kind of infection he could get. "Take the dressing off, let me get a look at it." Blancett took it off. About a dozen needle-fine cuts had been punched into the man's palm. "It doesn't look bad," Conners said, "it barely broke the skin. We'll put you on a spectrum of antibiotics, just to be safe."

"What did you do?" Miyagi asked, referring to the events leading up to the bite.

"What do you think?" Blancett spat. "I _shot_ the fucking thing."

Conners stopped, and the others tensed.

"You _killed _it?"

"What difference does it make anymore?" Blancett said. "We couldn't interrogate it; it couldn't speak English, and it's not like we can report anything we learn from those prisoners now, anyway."

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence.

"He _bit _me," Blancett insisted.


	5. The Subnova Conspiracy

**Chapter Four:  
****The Subnova Conspiracy**

_October 1, 2552  
__Ninth Age of Reclamation_

_Day 3_

A Phantom dropped down from the sky and came to a hover twenty-five feet over the half-buried structure. A single elite in forest-green armor gently dropped to the scorched ground on a wave of inverted gravity, and the phantom quickly retreated into the angry red clouds. The elite watched it leave before looking at his surroundings. A Scarab had been deployed at the site for excavating the structure, as per his instructions, along with a full security detachment and his scientific staff. He knew that no live humans would be found at the site, as it had been permitted to 'bake' for half a minute before the energy dome was erected to give the dig site a livable temperature. The security detachment had been hand-picked by members of the high council to protect him from other elites.

He noticed that a fellow sangheili had set the unggoy to disposing of the bodies of humans that littered the dig site, pushing them through the energy dome that had been erected to shield the dig site from the hostile environment outside. Outside the translucent energy dome, the bodies were quickly burned to ash by the unfathomable air and ground temperatures. He approached the grunts with an annoyed look on his face. "What are you doing?" he asked.

A red-armored grunt looked up and sniffed. "Master tell me to purify dig site. Me do what master say."

"I did not authorize it. Who is your master?"

"Master 'Putnamee," the grunt replied. "Over there."

The green-armored elite walked over to the gold-armored Fieldmaster, who was busily coordinating the deployment of equipment. He turned, clearly annoyed.

"What?"

The other elite, four inches shorter than the Fieldmaster, stood up straight in attempts to come across as more imposing. "You are not to destroy the bodies of the humans or their equipment," he said.

'Putnamee snorted. "Should the site continue to be polluted by their presence?"

"I wish to review the data they uncovered about the object before we destroy their equipment."

The Fieldmaster huffed.

"The Prophet of Supposition himself gave me complete autonomy," the elite continued, "which means that your schedule, thus the degree to which you will have access to the object, are ultimately up to me."

'Putnamee snorted, restraining his anger. "Very well," he said, "if Supposition has given you the authority, I shall not dispute it. I simply find it _curious_ how you seem so eager to interact with humans, however indirectly. It would appear they set up a crude research center there, but I would not waste my time. They beat us to destroying their equipment."

The green-armored elite nodded and left the Fieldmaster to his business. He walked towards the research center, eying the partially-uncovered Forerunner structure. An area of ten square kilometers, the amount of land covered by a single plasma bomb, had been spared out of this entire world so that the buried structure could be researched. He entered the human structure, ducking to avoid hitting his head on the low ceiling. Inside the structure was a number of other human bodies. He noticed that their equipment was, indeed, destroyed, most likely to keep the Covenant from learning what the humans knew about the Forerunner structure. The elite would never admit it in so many words, but he was impressed that the humans had succeeded in as much as they had. They had located and excavated the structure, at least in part, without damaging it. It was truly a shame that he would not be able to see their data. It could have saved him time, but then, time here was all he had.

Exli 'Uqsotee was, for lack of a better analogy, a military scientist. His highly controversial research and development program was considered a blessing by some and heresy by others. Some chose to see the program as a sacreligious attempt to improve Forerunner technology, but Exli did not. He saw his efforts as an attempt to better understand those that he served, to grow closer to the Forerunners through replicating their technology. Unfortunately, many these days had grown... overzealous. Reactionary. Stuck in the traditional methods of the past, and unwilling to move on to a brighter future. Exli believed that his research and development program could achieve that end. Perhaps the only reason he had not already been convicted of heresy was because the Covenant had begun to see the fruits of his weapons research. Already during his career, he had corrected a flaw that had plagued the Fuel-Rod Cannon. He had discovered a way to stabilize the weapon's ammunition during the enrichment stage so that it would no longer spontaneously explode when the weapon was dropped. He had reworked the propulsion systems of the Ghost and Banshee to allow for quick boosts of speed. Perhaps most controversially, he designed weapons and vehicles from observing those used by humans. The Spectre, for example, was a design that had come to mind based loosely on studying the Warthog.

'Uqsotee had gained powerful allies in the Sangheili branch of the High Council; however, the prophets were not as readily impressed by his efforts. He found it ironic that despite the prophets' frequent condemnation of his work, he was still the one they went to when objects such as the one on Coral were to be investigated. On the whole, most held him in poor regard, and this was not aided by the fact that 'Uqsotee hadn't fired a weapon since the Inquisitor Academies. Perhaps that was why he remained unsuccessful in courting a mate. As always, he brushed off such thoughts and instead buried himself in his work, in the world of science. He knew he had not long to continue his work before a zealous vigilante saw fit to end his life.

After all, several junior members of his program had already met with 'unfortunate accidents'.

# # # # # # #

_**Personal Log Entry/Memo  
**__**Filer: Miyagi, Yuji  
**__**Date: 1 October 2552  
**__**Subject: Rampancy**_

For the life of me, I don't know why this has happened. Quincy's behavior has grown increasingly erratic and antisocial. His timestamp places his age at only two years, four months, and nine days, but he displays all known symptoms of AI rampancy. He seems to be avoiding human contact, and he hasn't interfered with anyone's computer use, but he doesn't help anyone, either. I've severed his connection to the Core, so hopefully he won't enter a sadistic phase and start fiddling with life support. I can quarantine him, to a point, but I'm afraid that I lack the proper tools to completely shut him down.

-End of Entry-

_**Personal Log Entry/Voice Memo  
**__**Filer: Blancett, Tyler  
**__**Date: 1 October 2552  
**__**Subject: bored**_

"I remember I had a bottle of Alt Burgandy in my dresser back in my apartment. Bottom drawer. Right side. I'd hidden it from myself. I swore to myself I'd never take another swig of that shit for the rest of my life. God, what I'd give for a shot of it now. Listening to these damn Covie prisoners, the grunts yammering back and forth in their squeaky little voices... I don't know why I stay down here, I really don't. I guess I don't care for the others much better right now. Everyone feels so bad for those lucky bastards up on the surface... they had it quick and painless, though, I tell you. Kinda wish I could've joined them. Ah, well, duty calls.

"Not sure what the hell's been up with my hand since the damn vulture bit me. All red. Burns like hell. Maybe that's just the antibiotics. Don't know. Hell, at least pain lets you know you're still alive. Not much else down here to remind you.

"Hey, what are you doing? Wipe that look off your ugly face. Hey, shut up! Don't make me come over- oh, now you're asking for it. You wanna go? Huh? You split-lipped son of a-"

-End of Entry-

Cortez walked down a lifeless titanium corridor, lined at random with doors that stared with lidless glass eyes. Besides the whistling of the air conditioning, all that could be heard was her own footsteps, echoing as if the floor itself were hollow. She had seen nobody for the last six hours. Following the glassing of the planet, everyone seemed withdrawn and chose to avoid contact with other people. Some of them busied themselves with meaningless tasks, others had taken to living in seclusion. Even Esko had started to spend long hours in the lab, playing with the crystal and growing irritable if anyone tried to start a conversation with him. There seemed to be a schedule forming in the mess hall, so that no more than one or two people were ever there at the same time, eating cold food straight from cans or taking MREs back to their quarters. Cortez had kept tabs on everybody. The only person she hadn't seen was Lieutenant Joshua Murdock.

She stopped in front of the door. The Lieutenant had locked himself inside two days ago, and nobody had seen him since. Everyone had their own way of dealing with the situation, but his was the most worrisome of all. Had he gone through with it? For all Cortez knew, he was dead. But then, weren't they all? The facility didn't exist to the outside world. Being buried alive a quarter of a kilometer under the surface of a glassed planet in what was now Covenant space, rescue was out of the question, even if ONI knew they were still alive. There was no way of contacting anyone, since the communications array had been on the surface. The Hall of the Mountain King had become an island, a prison for its seven inmates. And the only sentence was life without parole.

She knocked on the door. It swung open, already unlocked. Papers littered the floor with no discernable form of organization. The Lieutenant was hunched over a desk, typing furiously. He glanced over his shoulder at Cortez and scowled.

"Oh," he said. "You. What do _you_ want?"

"Sir?" she said. Murdock stopped typing. "It's been two days, sir, are you alright?"

"No," he replied, "but thanks anyway." He started typing again. Cortez picked up one of the papers off the floor. It showed a false-spectrum picture of the crystal, labeled 'Subnova' but saying nothing else. She picked up another paper off the floor. It was a schematic of the facility, but at first she mistook it for a cross-section of an ant colony.

"What is all this?" she asked.

"Two day's work," he said. "I've been trying, but I can't figure it out."

"Figure what out?"

"What is the purpose of this place? Why was all of this built? What is that crystal? You name it."

"But a schematic of the facility? What's that got to do with anything?"

He started typing again, scanning through various personnel bios and project reports. "Take a look at that schematic. Look at the way the corridors weave and turn. It's completely nonsensical. You have elevators scattered at random; some of them only go between two levels. There's also floors that slope so steeply that you can go down two levels without a flight of stairs in between. There's redundant components, unnecessary additions, dead-end corridors; it would have cost a fortune to build this place, and as far as I can tell, a lot of it is unused. There's equipment in use here that's over fifty years old. Rather than replace the old equipment with new equipment, they jury-rigged components to make new and old machinery compatible. The computer system is older than the facility itself, but they somehow crammed a smart AI in it, and it's managed to disappear in some unseen corner of the network. Nobody's heard from it for days. ONI tries to operate like a well-oiled machine, but here the system has been turned completely upside-down. There has to be a reason this place was built like this, but for the life of me I don't know _why!_" He looked again at the computer, tightened his hand into a fist, and slammed it down on the console in frustration. "Dammit!"

Cortez cocked her head. "When is the last time you ate?"

He took several deep breaths. "Two days."

"She's gone, Joshua," Cortez said. He turned in his chair and glared at her. "It will take time to accept that, but you can't bring her back. This," she lifted a stack of discarded papers, "won't bring her back. You can't let yourself fall apart like this. You've got all the time in the world to figure it out. Just come with me and grab a sandwich. It'll clear your head."

"Don't try to..." he spat. Cortez scowled. Murdock stopped himself and wiped the sweat off his forehead. "Look," he said, "I'm... sorry... for how I've been acting. It's just... I think it would best if you just left me alone."

"Look," she said, her temper reaching the boiling point. "I'm not her, all right? You're going to have to deal with it. I can't crawl back up that damn elevator and trade places with her. It's over. It's _done!_ I'm not your enemy, okay? Everyone around here treats you and I like some kind of pariah. You may have noticed I'm the only one who's cared enough to check in on you."

There was an uncomfortable silence. Cortez cursed and thumped her fist against the wall, turning to leave.

"Do you regret it?" Murdock asked.

Cortez stopped. "Regret what?"

"Leaving your unit. Coming here."

"Yes," she said after a pause. "I don't know why I was chosen. I don't have a death wish, but I don't know why I'm here. Why, out of everyone do I deserve to go on? You know what I mean?"

"That's the only reason I didn't go through with it," he said. "There's gotta be some reason for all this. I don't know why, but there's some reason we survived. Maybe chance. Maybe God. Maybe duty. I don't know. But there's something we are still meant to do. I can't prove it, but I just _know_."

"All we've got is time to figure that out," Cortez said. There was another pause. "Lunch?"

"Yeah," Murdock replied, wiping his forehead. "Okay."

He turned off the computer and walked out of the room with her, letting the door fall shut behind them.

# # # # # # #

_Day 4_

_**Bulletin Board Entry/Public Access Permitted  
**__**Filer: Conners, Laura  
**__**Date: 2 October 2552  
**__**Subject: Slipspace Transfer Protocol**_

It may be possible for us to contact the UNSC through use of the slipspace probes that were placed around Coral as an early warning system. If the satellites are still following their original programming, and I can't think of why they wouldn't be, and the Covenant has chosen not to destroy them, then the satellites should have recognized by now that the feed from the surface has been lost and gone into standby mode. They should be waiting for contact to be reestablished, and given the effect that the glassing process must have had on Coral's magnetic field, their programming should be open and eager for orbital course corrections. It would be possible to fire a simple program up to the network that would send a distress signal through the slipstream when they resume their jumps. If we're lucky, the Covenant wouldn't find the signal unless they were deliberately looking for it.

The only problem is that the communications array was on the surface. We have a lasergram transmitter here, but if we're unwilling to go to the surface to set it up, it will only be able to point straight up and out of the elevator shaft instead of being able to track a satellite in the sky and communicate with it. I know a potential suicide mission isn't a popular idea right now, but we're all dead anyway. Our only chance to get in touch with UNSC forces will be to go to the surface and give this a try.

-Edit-

Seriously, guys, I really think this will work. It's not like we have anything to gain by waiting for them to write us off.

-Edit-

Sometimes, I really don't know why I bother.

-End of Entry-

Tyler Blancett looked up as the door of the brig slid open. He tossed aside his cold ham sandwich, wiping his mouth with his hand and standing up. Lieutenant Joshua Murdock entered the room alone and the door slid shut behind him. Murdock waved his hand in front of his face, surprised by the stench in the room.

"Z-man," Blancett said in a slightly mocking voice, "what brings you to the basement?"

"I need to borrow one of your prisoners," Murdock replied.

"Take any one you want, he's yours. Not much of a fuckin' point left to questioning them, though, eh?"

_Not much point in guarding them, either, _Murdock thought. He stopped in front of the cell of one of the grunts, cowering in the back of his cell. "Him," he said.

Blancett pushed himself off of the chair and walked over to the cell, slapping his hand against the scanner by the cell. The device read a signal from the chip implanted in Blancett's hand and the cell opened. The grunt buried its head upon seeing Blancett. Murdock looked at the man's hand, surprised. It was covered with red sores.

"How's the hand?"

"Gangrenous," Blancett joked. "The fuckin' jackal bit me. I took care of him, though, you better believe it."

Murdock looked at the cell closest to the guard's podium. He could see a pair of small hooves in the door, surrounded by a pool of dried purple blood.

"You were probably wonderin' 'bout the stink," Blancett said, still chewing part of the sandwich.

"Really," Murdock said sarcastically. "You plan to clean that up?"

Blancett spat the sandwich out on the floor. "I'll get around to it."

Murdock shook his head and stepped into the cell. He grabbed the orange-armored grunt by its left hand, yanking it to its feet. It shrieked in terror and fainted. Blancett laughed. "Them gas-suckers," he said, "they scare pretty easy, don't they?"

_I wonder why,_ Murdock thought, stealing one last look at the dead jackal. Blancett had apparently scared the living hell out of the grunts by killing the jackal, and sooner or later it would begin to get to the elites, too, with time. A barbaric strategy, yes, but given recent events, Murdock was not in a polite mood. To hell with regulations. If he had to beat the information he needed out of these prisoners, so be it. It was no less than they deserved.

# # # # # # #

Murdock watched as the grunt woke up. It shook its head, then looked at him and let out a yelp of surprise. Grunts were not used to being alone, it seemed. It turned to run, but there was only a titanium wall in the way. Murdock watched it without moving for about a minute before it realized there was no way out and finally began to calm down. It sat on the floor in the corner, cowering like a beaten dog.

"Please, no hurt," it rasped. "No me hurt."

"Right now, I'm in a relatively calm mood," Murdock said. "You are going to answer my questions now. If you don't, I might lose my temper."

The grunt stood up relatively straight.

"What was your master looking for?" Murdock asked.

The grunt hesitated. "Me no tell. Master no want me to tell."

"Fine, we'll play it your way." Murdock placed an M6C on the table. The grunt took one look at the weapon, gulped, and sat down on the floor again.

"So," Murdock said, "what was your master looking for?"

# # # # # # #

Keom 'Yerumee leaned closer to the electrified bars of his cell to see the interrogator returning with the grunt. He guided it into its cell and locked it in again. The guard said something to banter him, but the interrogator brushed him off and came to a stop directly in front of his cell. _So_, he thought, _this was the human who broke the will of my apprentice?_ 'Yerumee was not impressed. The human was not the largest of his kind, and clearly did not intimidate the guard. How could he have loosened the tongue of a Sangheili warrior? He had found, to his surprise, just how weak his apprentice had been, and had made his disappointment known to the elite over the last few days without saying a word to him. Seeing the human who caused it only cast Ilion 'Hoksatee in a more shameful light in the eyes of his master. 'Yerumee was certain that he would perform far better. Now would be his chance.

"You," Murdock said to Blancett, "bring the shotgun. We're taking him to the lab. Now."

The major was both surprised and insulted. The last time he had been interrogated, he had been sedated and brought into the questioning room. Surely they did not think so little of him that they would only take such feeble measures to protect themselves? He would never dream of using their own weapon against them. To so much as handle a human weapon would be sacreligious. All he would have to do was strike the moment the cell was opened. He could easily kill them both if he chose to, and put his former apprentice to shame by doing what he could not.

But then, perhaps he could learn something of real importance from them. He would wait to see what it was they wished to show him and, if he then chose to do so, he could arrange his escape. The Covenant had most certainly noticed the vault he had meant to inspect. If he could signal them, they could burn this last bastion of humanity and complete the purification of this world.

The cell slid open. The interrogator stood there, unarmed, with the guard standing at a greater distance with the shotgun.

"Get up," Murdock said. 'Yerumee huffed and did as he was told. This human, he promised, would pay dearly for his lack of respect. 'Yerumee stepped out of his cell. The human had to crain his neck to look the major in the eye, but there was no fear in the human's eyes. The major was slightly taken aback. He could effortlessly kill the human, yes, but it seemed to have either no fear or no regard for its own life. Curious. 'Yerumee followed Murdock out of the brig and through a winding corridor, memorizing every landmark he saw. Such knowledge could prove useful once his moment came. What foolishness on the humans' part, to let him see the entire facility! They must have still been shaken by the glassing of the planet. That could be the only explanation for such thoughtless behavior. Unless...

'Yerumee's air of superiority shook a little. Unless... they intended to kill him as soon as they were finished with him. He should have killed the two humans at his first opportunity. They were not likely to give him another.

The door to the lab slid open. Murdock entered the door and stepped out of the way as 'Yerumee entered the room with Blancett following at a safe distance. Esko Korpijaakko looked up from the crystal in surprise and backed away upon seeing the elite, sending a look of utter shock at Murdock. The interrogator watched emotionlessly as the elite slowed to a stop, speechless. 'Yerumee stared at the green crystal in awe and began to approach it.

"That's close enough," Murdock said. Blancett tensed, still pointing the shotgun at the Major's back. 'Yerumee stopped short, his pride again hurt by having to take orders from a human.

The interrogator circled around 'Yerumee. "What were you looking for?" he asked softly.

"Something far less worthy than this," 'Yerumee said, still in awe of the object. "The Holy Light... bringing such a prize to the Prophets could be enough to-"

The elite shook himself in horror. How much had he just told the human? Was this how the interrogator had made his apprentice talk? He glared at the human, who was leaning over the table and looking deep into the green crystal. The tesseract was still visible, inexplicably etched inside the crystal itself.

The elite then noticed that the human had a hammer in his hand.

"What is this thing?" Murdock asked.

"It is worthless," 'Yerumee blurted. Panic began to spread through his mind like a disease. Surely the human would not dare to-

"Really?" Murdock raised the hammer. "Then I suppose we don't need it anymore."

"You wouldn't," the Major said. He could tell by the look on the human's face that he most definitely would.

"What were you looking for?"

"Put your weapon down, human..."

Murdock tapped the hammer on the top of the crystal, somewhat less than gently. It made the loud, high-pitched sound of a spoon on a glass, but the strange light show within the crystal visibly accelerated. The major cringed as though it had left his ears ringing.

"That was your last warning. Now it's gonna be in tiny pieces. What were you looking for?"

"You should know! You had already unearthed it!" 'Yerumee shouted. Murdock cast a cold look at Esko, who was standing along the wall of the lab at what he considered to be a safe distance from the elite. He turned his attention back to the elite.

"What is this crystal?"

'Yerumee glared. "I shall tell you nothing."

"Explain to me why I shouldn't smash it. Explain to me what exactly it does."

"I do not know, human. Such things were kept to the Hierarchs themselves." 'Yerumee cringed again. Murdock had hit a nerve. Were they the rulers of the Covenant? Then what was the High Council?

"What was at the dig site? Was it made by the Covenant?"

"No."

"Do _not_ lie to me, Major! Was that structure Covenant?"

"No!"

"What was it?"

"I do not know! The Jiralhanae have changed everything. The Covenant is prepared to break, and should the Sangheili lose the Prophet's favor, the bloodshed would be unimaginable! I have done only what I saw as necessary to defend my people, but your foul kind had to interfere! You are truly the devil race, come to bring death to us all! There is no telling what could happen to my people should the Jiralhanae be unleashed!"

That settled it. "Now wasn't that easy, 'Yerumee?" Murdock said, setting down the hammer. The Major stared in shock. Murdock could have said more but decided it was better to let the major stew, wondering how much that grunt had told him. "Blancett, take this piece of shit back to his cell," Murdock said. "Doctor, I need to talk with you."

"But... but I need to-" Esko stammered.

"_Now,_ doctor."

Esko raised his hands in surrender and followed Murdock to the interrogation room. Murdock shut them both in and locked the door. He took a moment to deactivate the camera in the room before facing the doctor. Esko expected the interrogator to express a murderous rage, but he seemed very calm.

"How did you know that elite's name?" he asked.

"I questioned one of the grunts earlier. All it took to loosen his tongue was to flash a gun in his face. Unfortunately, he didn't know too much, but the good major just gave me more intel than I could have ever hoped for."

"Oh," Esko said. "Why question me here?"

"This is the most soundproofed room in the facility. I don't want the others interfering, because frankly I think they caused this mess." Murdock looked at the titanium door in the windowless room. Esko leaned against the table, his hands curling underneath. He didn't even notice the switch when he hit it.

"Now, I need to know what you were looking for at that dig site, doctor, and I need to know now."

# # # # # # #

Keom 'Yerumee sat in his cell with his head buried in his arms. He had honestly believed that he could face down the interrogator, but he had ended up revealing more to the humans than his apprentice had. Without even saying a word, he had severely chastized his apprentice for saying so much by giving him withering glances whenever the minor had the courage to look up. Now, his apprentice sat in the cell across from his, giving him a look of pity that shamed the major even worse. The humans were far more crafty than the Major had given them credit for, he realized. But his pride had been wounded, and now his thirst for revenge was all the greater. The next time the cursed human came into the cell block, he would not hesitate to kill him.

"-to know what you were looking for at that dig site, doctor, and I need to know now."

Keom 'Yerumee lifted his head as the speaker in his cell began talking again. He looked to the other cells in confusion, performing a quick head count. His apprentice and the three unggoy were all there. Who could they be questioning?

"I'm not supposed to say-"

"I'm with Internal Affairs, doctor. You report to Section One, Section One reports to us. What did you dig up?"

Not a prisoner at all! The device must have activated accidentally. The humans had been thrown off balance by the arrival of the Covenant, and were beginning to go at each other's throats. 'Yerumee tried to think of ways to exploit the situation before what the humans were discussing began to truly sink in.

"Well... I'm not sure if they were Section One actually... but what we've found is a remarkable artifact of alien origin."

'Yerumee stood up in shock, nearly hitting his head on the ceiling of the low cell. The humans were discussing the place he had meant to find.

"I know that much. Could it have led them here?"

"Well... no. We actually have no idea what it was. It looked like the top of a structure... a _vault_ buried underground. It was found during routine quarrying. The rock it was buried in was evaporated, but the artifact itself wasn't even scorched. It seemed practically indestructable. I had the impression that the part we uncovered was just a small piece of the object, but the Covenant got here before we could really learn anything.,"

'Yerumee continued to listen intently to the conversation, learning little that he had not already expected. That the humans would have the nerve to meddle with such a holy site! 'Yerumee would not stand for it.

"Just... sum it up," the first human said.

"It's not Covenant. It might be another race that we've never even heard of. I don't know who built it, I don't have a clue."

The feed abruptly cut off. 'Yerumee was about to curse the humans for their ignorance when a switch flipped in his mind. The human did not know of the forerunners? How could they not? They were a direct affront to them, their greatest foes... but how could they consider those they did not know of to be their enemies? Could the humans have been misidentified? Could the prophecy have been wrong? The questions grew too much for the Sangheili warrior. 'Yerumee finally decided that the humans had intentionally sent the feed down into his cell in attempts to manipulate him. They were very deceptive. Such a lie could not shake his faith in the Covenant, or break the promise of the Great Journey. 'Yerumee tried to forget what he had heard, to tune out their lies.

But the seed of doubt had been planted in his mind, and given time it would grow.

# # # # # # #

"And the crystal?"

"I'd been meaning to ask you... where did you find it?"

"An ONI prowler traded a couple of fake bombs for it with some backwater rebels living in an asteroid belt in the Eridanus system. They were part of something called Operation Hypodermic. Ever heard of it from those ONI guys at the dig site?"

Esko slowly shook his head.

"Found the file in the central database," Murdock said. "It only had two things in it. One was a blank personnel file named Coalminer and the other was the name of this facility. I know that the people here must know more about it, but so far, they aren't talking. What have you found out about the artifact itself?"

"Your guess is as good as mine," Esko said. "It's lined with squares, triangles, lines, and dots. One face of the polyhedron has a unique feature, though, a set of concentric septagons with some sort of ruinic symbol in the center. What I thought was most interesting was the shape inside the crystal itself. It's a tesseract, a hypercube. I'm sorry, I mean it's a mathematical symbol, a three-dimensional representation of-"

"Of the theoretical fourth spatial dimension. A cube in a cube, with all points connected. I know. Any idea what it does?"

"I would guess that the septagons outline a trigger of some kind, but I haven't been brave enough to touch it and see what happens."

"Good. Don't. I think it might have created the slipspace ripple that-"

Murdock stopped talking mid-sentence.

"What?"

"Where's Conners?" Murdock said, breathing heavily. "I need to talk to Conners, right now!"

# # # # # # #

_Day 5_

_**Personal Log Entry/Voice Memo  
**__**Filer: Murdock, Joshua  
**__**Date: 3 October 2552  
**__**Subject: Subnova artifact/Operation HYPODERMIC**_

"The crystal is a weapon.

"There's a tesseract inside the crystal, a representation of the fourth spatial dimension. Space within space. The slipstream is the closest thing I can think of to that.

"It's a slipspace bomb of some kind. The way it's powered is unknown, the way it works is unknown, but it's a weapon. I'd guess that, when it's activated, it sends some kind of shockwave through the slipstream capable of disintegrating any three-dimensional matter it comes in contact with. It'd be at least as potent as a NOVA. That would explain its project name. Subnova. Subspace NOVA. I suppose the scariest part is that it isn't manmade.

"I've talked with Conners. What we know is that when the artifact was last activated, both of our slipspace probes that were diving at the time were destroyed. Afterward, an amorphous mass was detected in the slipstream approaching Coral. I think that mass used to be one or more Covenant ships. A scouting party. The Covenant would have found Coral if the artifact had been activated or not, but after inexplicably losing contact with their scouting party, it was a foregone conclusion that they would send more ships.

"The shockwave was apparently powerful enough that, to some small effect, it could be felt in normal space. That would explain what happened here, the disorientation, the fragmented vision. That all makes sense to me, but I still am not sure how Subnova got here in the first place.

"Okay. Got to slow down, I'm getting ahead of myself. So the _Applebee_ was at Reach when the Covenant showed up. They cut into slipspace and ran before the Covenant picked them up, probably not clearing all of their navigational database. No, that doesn't make sense, the shipboard AI probably wouldn't have let them make the jump. It couldn't be a blind jump, either. The odds of ending up in a chartered star system would be... it couldn't have been random. Okay, so their intention was to go to Eridanus, and they already had that destination locked into the computer. But why wait until the Covenant attacked to carry out the jump if it was planned in advance? The operation had to be bigger, had to need more ships. They must have planned to jump simultaneously or something. I guess that would make more sense.

"So, if their ultimate destination was supposed to be Coral, why stop in Eridanus? It must have been intended as a covert op, and jumping twice was supposed to cover their tracks. But did the _Applebee_ even know about the crystal in the Eridanus system? If not, then what had they planned to do on Coral anyway? I suppose the crystal was an unexpected bonus, something they just happened to pick up. But their mission still leads them here. The dig outside of town hadn't even started when the _Applebee_ made it's jump, so they couldn't have come to Coral to find that. They weren't looking for the crystal, they weren't looking for the dig site. They must have been here for something else. Their original intent had to be to find something else that is being held here."

A sigh. "I guess I'll check the project records again."

-End of Entry-

_**Letter to Supposition**_

We proceed with success at the site of the vault. We have breached the top of the structure with minimal damage, and have begun our explorations of the interior of the vault. It appears to lead far under the surface of this planet, though our scans from space showed this facility as only a mineral deposit. It would seem that the Forerunners intended for it to remain hidden, and through some twist of fate, the Covenant would likely have missed it altogether had the humans not unearthed it accidentally. There was little to learn from their equipment, as the security forces I requested destroyed much of it before I had access to their research, despite my explicit instructions. Discipline for those responsible is in order. New findings are being made, though we have not yet succeeded in determining the true purpose of the facility. As always, I shall keep you posted.

Your faithful servant,

Exli 'Uqsotee, Research and Development

_**Personal Log Entry/Voice Memo  
**__**Filer: Blancett, Tyler  
**__**Date: 3 October 2552  
**__**Subject: still bored**_

"My damn hand's acting up even more. Oozy. The sores split open, and some of the skin's turned gray. Don't know what the fuck's going on, but apparently that bitch Conners didn't help. So much for medical training. Damn antibiotics, might as well have been placebos.

"Stinks even worse in here now. I think one of the shots ruptured its methane tank. He wouldn't shut up. The damn grunt wouldn't shut up. _I_ shut it up. Only two of those bastards left, now. Looked like the Z-man finished with them anyway. Shit. I guess I ought to clean up the mess, but what's the damn point anymore?

"_Who else wants to mouth off, now, huh?_"

-End of Entry-


	6. Rampancy

**Chapter Five:  
Rampancy**

_Day 5_

_**Sealed Letter to Exli 'Uqsotee, Research and Development**_

Though I look forward to seeing how your excavation progresses, I fear that the Covenant is in an increasingly unstable state. You are already aware of the atrocity at Halo, but it seems that our misfortunes are still compounding.

I had conferred with his holiness the Prophet of Regret about the location of the human homeworld. For a variety of reasons, I had come to believe that I had located it. The Hierarch saw wisdom in my proposal and ordered thirty-five fleets, over five hundred proud vessels, to congregate at the _Unyielding Hierophant_. However, when three of our frigates were lost on a routine scouting mission, Regret ordered my fleet to this system. This you know. But word has reached my ears that the _Unyielding Hierophant_, along with almost all of its ships, has been utterly destroyed. The demon has struck again.

This development has taken priority over the artifact on Coral, and Regret has been recalled to High Charity. Regret has been shamed in the eyes of the Hierarchs, and rumor entails that the Fleet of Persistent Regret is to proceed alone to investigate the Sol system on what may yet prove to be a suicide mission. As the master of Regret's fleet, I have been recalled, as well. Do not expect my return.

The Prophet of Supposition has been given authority over ten ships which shall remain in orbit of Coral to help safekeep your find. The Council of Deed and Doctrine has seen fit to allow the excavation to be completed under his supervision, but should war come again with the humans, this force may be recalled as well.

You are aware of the tensions within the High Council. The Prophets, as yet, seem unimpressed with this find. Many of our people harbor ill intent towards you, as did I. I realize now that you are no heretic. I sense that civil war is close, and the discoveries you bring before the Hierarchs may yet determine with whom they will side in the conflict to come. Do not forget your people. Do not fail. The lives of our families may depend on it.

Best of fortunes,  
Aya 'Daulanee, Master of the Fleet of Persistent Regret

_**Letter to Regret**_

I have learned of your upcoming departure. May the forerunners keep you in your journey. I understand the timing of this letter is somewhat unseemly, but I felt it necessary to inform you of our progress.

A lower level to the facility has been discovered, a shaft leading hundreds of meters underground. We do not yet know what Forerunner secrets remain hidden there, but the uniqueness of this find suggests that it holds special significance. It is possible that it leads to a greater series of chambers further underground. This may not seem a significant development, but writings in the chambers that have already been explored have detailed an even greater prize. I have uncovered and partially decrypted a series of coordinates leading to star systems our Covenant is familiar with. The first of these coordinates led to the planet the humans called Reach, more specifically, to the chamber in which they found the Holy Light which the humans later stole and brutally destroyed. However, a second set of coordinates points to an asteroid belt in the Eridanus system, leading me to believe that there is a second crystal to be found there.

I am aware that the politics of High Charity are sensitive at best, but I humbly request that you pass word to Truth and Mercy that this find was made by the Sangheili, rather than the Jiralhanae. I wish you only best of fortune before the council.

Your faithful servant,  
Exli 'Uqsotee, Research and Development

_**Sealed Letter to Supposition**_

I shall assume that you have been made aware of my upcoming departure. As I take my leave on this venture, the search of the great Vault has been delegated to you. However, in these troubled times, the lines of battle are being drawn, even beyond High Charity. It would be wise to take heed of your scientist, for it now seems that he may wish to use this find for political gain in the coming conflicts. What he may make for in ingenuity, he fails in subtlety: the prize of which he spoke was a crystal that has, to the best of our knowledge, already fallen into human hands.

He remains ignorant of the true purpose of this facility, and with fortune, that is how he shall remain. I leave him to your discretion, but take warning: Should this meddler dig too deep, you know what must be done. He shall not be missed.

By my own hand,  
Prophet of Regret

_**Personal Log Entry/Voice Memo  
**__**Filer: Jones, Michael  
**__**Date: 3 October 2552  
**__**Subject: Already a dead man**_

"I hate this switch. I hate it with _every fiber_ of my being. The colonel said there was a reason it was called a dead man's switch. So if I don't hit it, I'm a dead man. It'll do something that it was only supposed to do after my death. I don't know what the hell that is. I've only got one theory, and I don't think it's a good one at that. It turns out that the nearest starport was exactly seven hours away, meaning that if you were to let the switch go, it would take you seven hours on foot to get to a ship that could get you off-world. I don't know if that means anything. The switch could be someone's stupid psychology experiment for all I know. All that sweat over it... dammit, I left three people to die resetting the damn thing.

"I don't care anymore. We've been down here for nearly a week. Still no sign. Here I thought the good colonel would come through for us, but nobody's coming. They've given up on us, left us for dead. They _think_ we're dead. Given our prospects, we might as well be. So screw it. I'm not touching that switch anymore. And if it kills me when it goes off... hell, death couldn't be a hell of a lot _worse._"

-Edit-

"I... dammit... I _tried_. I wanted to just let it go. But I couldn't. I _couldn't_. Is that what I'm made of? Don't even have the courage to let the clock hit zero... got it down to seven seconds and chickened out. I... I can't do it. Rescue may never come. But I'm gonna end up hitting that thing 'til the day I die.

-End of Entry-

_**Personal Log Entry/Memo  
**__**Filer: PFC Cortez, Maria  
**__**Date: 3 October 2552  
**__**Subject: Staying alive**_

I've just started to realize how much I missed my regular workout. I'm going to start doing it again today. It's been nearly a week since Coral was glassed. All this sitting around is just unhealthy. I hope they have some decent weight equipment down here.

-Edit-

I was just coming back from the mess hall. I got to my room and started my routine, push-ups, sit-ups, squats... but Tyler showed up. He stood there, in the doorway, watching. I confronted him - he was being a complete creep - but he wouldn't leave. Started telling me that I was lonely, that I 'needed a friend.' He was blocking the door - tried to come into the room. I had to pull my M6 on him to get him to leave, even that didn't seem to scare him. Joshua saw what was happening and nearly knifed him in the hall... but he didn't. As long as Tyler's still here, I'm not sure if any of us are safe. But even I'm not bold enough to take him out. With everyone so suspicious of each other, I'm not sure what to think anymore. Maybe we're all losing our minds down here. I mean, what would it look like if I just killed him outright?

I'll give it a little more time. Everyone's going through episodes. But if he does it again, to me or anyone else, I'll kill him. I just hope I made the right decision.

-End of Entry-

_**Personal Log Entry/Voice Memo  
**__**Filer: Blancett, Tyler  
**__**Date: 3 October 2552  
**__**Subject: Happy Hour**_

"Got a line on some booze. Hell, it was sitting in front of me all along. And here I was really starting to hate this place.

"Section III's official policy was 'no intoxicating beverages are to be allowed on the base'. That really pissed me off. Hell, what's wrong with a shot now and then to clear your mind? Hell, with our shitty situation, all I want to do is crawl into a bottle and forget about it. Yeah, I know, my AA counselor would be pissed at me if she wasn't dead. Really, though, who gives a shit? Anywho, I did some detective work. Turns out that the shit they use to sedate the split-lips for interrogation is 100 percent pure ethanol. The bastards told me it was only used to fuel cars. But I've done some snoopin'. That's grain alcohol. Honest-to-God 200-proof hard liquor. They have a whole drum full of the shit, and they never told me. Bastards. Hammer a full glass of that back, and you'd drop dead of alcohol poisoning. Hell, can't think of a better way to go!

"It'll probably help my hand, too. Clean it out a little bit. It looks like shit these days. Skin's all bubbling and oozing and peeling. I scratched at the really icky part and all these weird blisters starting to pop up. The damn jackal must have had a cold, or something. All them antibiotics, and my hand's still rotting off my fuckin' arm. I swear, next time I see Conners, I'll twist her damn head off.

"Down to only four of these damn Covies left. Fun as hell shootin' them. That's poetic justice if I ever saw it, but I probably ought to start spacing them out or I'll run out too quick. Getting sick of executing them, though. Shotty in the cell, no challenge there. Maybe I could turn one of the grunts loose. Plenty of places for it to hide down here, make for an interesting hunt. 'Course, once the covies are gone, what'll I do then?

"I guess there's always the others. Hell, we're already dead anyways.

"Enough bullshitting, though. Time to start killing brain cells. Cheers."

-End of Entry-

# # # # # # #

_Day 6_

The environment regulating system sounded much like the whipping winds that raked across Coral's tortured surface; the sound of emptiness echoing down the deserted corridors. An irregular metallic clicking sound played through the lifeless titanium room as Joshua Murdock toyed with his wristwatch, idly pulling a nearly-invisible wire out of a concealed reel built into the titanium watchband and letting it wind in, over and over again, lost in thought. He shifted his gaze from the bare metal wall to the watch itself, pausing shortly before slowly pulling the wire back out of the reel.

The watch had been a present from Julia... later modified. She had bought him the watch, he had bought her a necklace. ONI never let covert operatives carry photos of anyone their agents knew in their personal lives. It had seemed harsh to him at first, but he had come to see the wisdom behind the policy. Most of the people he had dealt with, he wouldn't _want_ to know who his friends and family were. But that meant that he had no pictures of her except those locked in his memory. And the only physical evidence left to say she had ever existed was the watch.

He looked at his reflection in the crystal watch face. _Joshua Murdock_, he thought. Who picked the names he was supposed to use, anyway? ONI regulated itself through an organization that was so secret that even its own members knew almost nothing about it, let alone who else was part of it. What was known for certain was that those who broke the rules were likely to end up under a bus.

Section Zero operated more like an organized crime operation than a government bureaucracy. Its agents were scattered throughout ONI, working for other departments. Almost nobody knew who any of the others were. There were probably other agents for Section Zero that weren't even on ONI's direct payroll; defense contractors, cops, businessmen... and bus drivers. When agents worked together on an investigation, they never met face to face or even knew who they were working with. Section Zero agents feared and respected their own system, because they never knew if their coworkers were agents, as well. Information was shared with untraceable electronic messages, and S0CO watched their every move. The system worked.

When S0CO called on an agent to perform a field task, they assumed the fake identity that was given to them and did exactly what they were told... even assassinations. Hence the concealed wire in his watch. He had never had to use it, and he was glad to keep it that way. He had killed men before. He never wanted to do it again.

Murdock pulled the cord out of the reel in his watch.

_They approached him, from the front and behind. Two street punks. Punks didn't usually move during the day; it made them a target for gang members. But it wasn't unheard of. After the Covenant annihilated the Outer Colonies, the Refus had begun to flood in. The UNSC had declared Coral its official refugee camp in attempts to take the load off of Earth. As a result, Coral had become one of the most crime-ridden planets in all of human-controlled space, the cesspool of the Inner Colonies. Organized crime was more powerful than the 'official' government, which was itself rife with corruption. Cops were essentially gang members with badges._

_Most people here didn't go out after dark anymore._

_He stared coldly at the hoodlum in front of him, listening intently to the movements of the other but knowing better than to turn around. Street punks he could deal with. Gang members, though, were a bigger problem. They would hold a grudge. And they would keep coming back until the person who crossed them was dead._

_One of the punks jammed an M6 in his back. The other stood in front of him with a switchblade. The punk behind him reached for his wallet. He whipped around, elbowing the gunman's arm away from his back. A gunshot rang out as he brought his open palm into the punk's face. The punk's head rocked back, but he grabbed him by the arm and punched him in the kidneys. He wrenched the gun out of his hand and swept his legs out from under him, and the punk's head hit the pavement, hard. He snatched the gun off the ground and whipped around to see if the other punk was coming at him with the knife, but the knife-wielding punk was lying on his back, staring blankly at the overcast sky. There was a small bloody hole in the center of his chest where the bullet had hit him, straight in the heart. He looked at the other. A dark pool was spreading around his head, crimson blood flowing down his face. His nose had been jammed up into his brain._

_They were both dead._

_A police siren wailed in the distance. He dropped the gun, turned, and ran._

Murdock let the wire reel back into the watchband and sat very still.

# # # # # # #

"Conners. Murdock."

"Oh... yes?"

"You sent a message around about a way to reestablish contact with Coral's TACSAT network. What would be involved with that?"

"We just need to go to the top of the elevator shaft and set up a lasergram transmitter. I can aim it from here with the computer. All we'd need to do is send a few simple commands up to the relay satellite, and it will make all of the slipspace probes around Coral resume their normal jumps and send a distress signal through the slipstream."

"How will we go about doing that?"

"We don't have environment suits, but we do have three suits of ODST battle armor which is even better. They're completely sealed and equipped with their own air supplies. I have no idea what the conditions are like on the surface of the planet; if the air pressure and temperature are in a livable range. It's a risk, but as I see it, it's the only chance we've got."

"When would conditions be most favorable?"

"Tonight. Coral will be moving into Vista's shadow. Total eclipse. It's the coolest we can expect the surface to get."

"I'm in."

# # # # # # #

ODST armor consisted of layers of Kevlar and ceramic-titanium armor. It hampered movement somewhat, but it gave the wearer the shock resistance they would need to survive hard-dropping from orbit into a combat zone. This didn't comfort Murdock. There was no telling how hostile Coral's surface would be, even at night. It was possible that he would cook the second the door was opened, but it was either that or stay underground until the last of his sanity dribbled away.

He pulled on the gloves and snapped them into place. The air pressure in the gloves increased. It felt like someone squeezing his hand, but it meant that air could not escape the glove. The seal was good.

He looked at the door of the elevator where he had rescued Cortez and Doctor Korpijaakko six days before. He wouldn't be going up the sealed elevator shaft. He would be going through the trapdoor directly over his head. There was, it turned out, a ladder that ran parallel to the elevator in another, smaller shaft. It had been put in place before the elevator was even built and used by workers while they built it. It remained to be seen if the top of the ladder was still there after the glassing of the planet. If it wasn't, they would be irrevocably trapped in the facility.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Cortez asked.

Murdock didn't known what to say. He would be setting up the lasergram mere feet from where Julia had died. Would he be emotionally compromised? Would he freeze up on the surface? There was probably nothing left of the building that had sat on the surface, let alone... he couldn't complete the thought.

"Hey," Cortez said, "you all right?"

Murdock swallowed, but his throat was dry. "Yes. I'm fine."

"Any one of us could do it instead, you know. You don't have to go through this again."

"No," Murdock said, "I need this."

Cortez understood. He needed to say goodbye.

Joshua Murdock clamped his helmet onto the suit. Cortez shook it, checking the seal. It was good. She looked for a moment at the reflective black glass that now hid his face. What expression did it hide? Fear? Sadness? She would never know. She wasn't sure why, but she wanted to say something. It was possible that she would never see him again. Seeing the look on her face, Murdock simply lowered his head. He picked up the lasergram transmitter, turned, and began to climb the ladder. An orange fiber-optic cable strung out of the transmitter, with a black mark drawn at every meter.

He would have to climb two hundred and fifty of them to reach the surface.

Cortez shook her head and watched until he disappeared into the darkness of the shaft before going back down the hall. Moments later, the lockdown doors leading to the elevator shaft closed and sealed. Hopefully they were still airtight. If they weren't, air from the surface that came down the shaft would spread throughout the facility... and if the estimates of Coral's surface temperature were wrong, it would cook everyone in the base.

# # # # # # #

Michael Jones took his attention off of video the feed from Murdock's helmet camera, eying his watch. He still had twenty minutes before he had to hit the switch again. This op would probably be finished before he was interrupted.

One of the other monitors in the room cleared to display a familiar face.

"Jones, got a minute?" Yuji Miyagi said.

"I'm a bit tied up right now, director," he replied, "we're trying to hook up with the surface again. What did you need?"

"Really? What exactly is your role?"

Jones snorted. "My job here's mostly automated. I'm supposed to sit here and keep an eye on things. If Quincy decides to jump in and royally fuck us, my job then is to tell everyone that we're royally fucked."

"Then you can spare a few minutes and help me alleviate that problem. Meet me in the Core."

# # # # # # #

"You're fifty meters from the surface, and you're doing fine," Conners said. Murdock knew there was some kind of mineral deposit between him and the facility that interfered with radio and microwave signals. His commset had been tied directly to the fiber-optic line instead of his radio. Murdock grunted and pulled himself up another rung of the ladder. He had been climbing for ten minutes in nearly absolute darkness. Sweat poured off his forehead, but he couldn't take off the helmet to wipe it off. The shaft was barely large enough for the ODST armor to fit through. There had been no obstructions in the shaft... so far. With the amount of light he had to work with, though, he probably wouldn't see one until he could touch it.

His helmet hit something hard. He climbed down one rung and looked up, craning his neck to see. His helmet didn't let him tilt his head back far in the small space.

"I'm at ten meters," he said into his comm. "I've hit some kind of obstruction."

"Good, that's the gate," Conners replied. "There's a manual release on the wall next to you. Pull it."

# # # # # # #

Michael Jones entered his passcode into the door, looking at the security monitor overhead. He had held suspicion of cameras as long as he could remember. He didn't like the idea of others watching him. As the door slid open, Yuji Miyagi turned his swivel chair around to face him.

"What was this about, director?" Jones asked.

"Quincy has been showing advanced symptoms of AI rampancy and presents a threat. You are going to help me shut him down."

"Last I checked, he was hiding in some corner of the network like a beaten dog."

"That's exactly why we have to act now. Have a seat."

Jones looked for a chair. Finding only a table, he grudgingly sat down.

"You don't know the full story," Miyagi said. "I suppose you've been too busy playing with your little switch."

"You can cut out the insults," Jones said. "What do you want?"

"Quincy, as you know, is only two years old. Smart AI's don't go rampant until age seven."

"On average."

"Age is, ultimately, irrelevant. What _causes_ rampancy is when the AI gains too much information and runs out of storage and processing space, in essence thinking itself to death. This _typically_ takes seven years, but Quincy happened to stumble onto a motherlode of information and completely overloaded his system, essentially giving himself a nervous breakdown that caused the symptoms we're seeing now."

"Where did he get all this information?"

"The Subnova artifact. I reviewed the video feed in the lab before the Pulse. Darcy inserted Quincy to conduct a full scan and determine the crystal's chemical and structural makeup. I believe now that Quincy accidentally activated the artifact. You see, when the artifact fired, Quincy was not detected in the facility _at all_. Seven seconds later, the Pulse ended, and Quincy returned."

Jones' mouth hung open. "Where did that crystal send him?"

"I... don't know. But I have been receiving images from him all day. Hundreds of images of stars. No two are from the same perspective. I've cross-referenced them with catalogued stars. Some of them are known, most of them are not. But in every image that included known stars, there was a single common thread."

"What?"

"Every single one of those images centered on the same star. Every single one was looking towards the same place. Earth."

# # # # # # #

Murdock pulled the lever. The titanium gate parted, and a wave of hot air washed down the shaft. The wind threatened to blow him back down the shaft, but he held on tightly and in a few moments the pressure equalized. His vision grew cloudy as the helmet's visor was coated in a fine layer of peroxide dust. He wiped his visor several times, finally clearing his vision. Even with no dust inside his helmet, he had to fight the instictive urge to cough. Murdock stopped climbing and looked at the heads-up display Conners had programmed.

"It's a hundred and five degrees up here, farenheit," he said. "Air pressure... pressure is about nine point four atmospheres."

"Are you all right?"

A pause. "Yeah."

"Good," Conners said. "Jones had said the lasergram and the cable should still work fine under those conditions. Can you see anything?"

"There's an opening up ahead... lots of dust, but... I can see the sky."

# # # # # # #

"Quincy was, as best as I can tell, split a thousandfold through a network made by the creators of the Subnova artifact. Receiving reams of data from so many sources simultaneously, Quincy would have 'aged' very rapidly, resulting in the rampant behavior we see now."

"I still don't see how he's an active threat to us."

"You don't get it, do you?" Miyagi said. "The problem isn't that he's rampant. The problem is that he has begun to freely share information, even though nobody asks him for it. He's developed a guilty conscience. He can't keep secrets anymore. It _hurts_. So he'll talk. And he'll keep talking until everyone knows what he knows."

"Oh... Murdock..."

"You don't have any idea what that Section Zero puke has put me through for the last week. His clearance gives him access to anything, so I've struggled to hide _everything_. But it hasn't been enough."

Sweat broke out on Jones' forehead. "What does he know?"

"He's been focusing most of his attention on Operation HYPODERMIC, but beyond the movements of the _Applebee_, he doesn't know much of anything. I had to delete the files before he picked up on it. Then the backups. Then I had to wipe the disk itself, just so he wouldn't descramble it. He's persistent as hell."

"All that data lost... Ackerson would be pissed."

"He probably has backups. Not that HYPODERMIC can be completed according to plan anyways."

"Then again, if a ship does show up..."

"Perhaps, if the crew were willing to cooperate," Miyagi said, "but that's irrelevant right now. Quincy knows about Ackerson's operation. _All_ of it. King Under the Mountain, S-III, the Chimera Initiative, everything. Everything that I had to erase from the project database is stored in his memory."

Michael Jones stiffened. "And now that he's talking again..."

"If our friend from Section Zero gets wind of any of this, it's all over."

Jones looked to the ceiling. "I thought it was all over anyway."

"It might. It might not. But even if we never get out, we'll have done our duty. Quincy must be destroyed."

Jones walked over to the nearest computer terminal. "All right, them. How do we go about doing this?"

# # # # # # #

Murdock reached up. There was no rung. There was no wall, either. He had reached the surface.

His hand came down on a flat, smooth surface that was covered in granular chips of rock. He reached up with his other hand and pulled himself out of the shaft, rolling onto his back and staring into the sky.

Coral was the largest moon of the gas giant Vista, the third and outermost planet in the system. From Earth, the orange dwarf star was just an insignificant pinpoint of light in the constellation Puppis. Twentieth-century astronomers had affectionately dubbed it HD 69830 and largely ignored it until early 2006 when three Neptune-mass planets had been discovered in stable orbits, but it wasn't until the year 2367 that the system was considered for colonization. Coral had been approaching its two hundredth birthday as a UNSC colony. Now it was one of many lifeless glass marbles, an unmarked grave for the people who had once called it home.

Through the cover of the dark, boiling clouds, he could still see the band of light reflecting off of the system's massive asteroid belt. Being the moon of a much larger planet, Coral spent much of its time in Vista's shadow. Planetary eclipses occured every two days, but thanks to the belt, little time was actually spent in absolute darkness. To visitors, Coral seemed to be in a state of perpetual twilight as zodiacal light from the belt lit up the sky from horizon to horizon with a soft white glow.

Seeing the friendly glow of the belt made Murdock feel strangely comforted, but it would not last. The belt was quickly vanishing from sight as Vista moved through the sky, blotting out all the stars and casting him into complete, hopeless darkness. Murdock squeezed his eyes shut tightly and sobbed quietly, overcome with emotion. There was nothing left for him to take comfort in. He had never felt more alone.

"I know what happened," Conners said. "You need to say it."

"There was nothing I could do! There was nothing I could do to save her! To save them!"

"You did everything you could."

"It wasn't enough... it wasn't..."

"Two people were in the most desparate situation of their lives in that elevator. You were there when they needed you most. The people on the surface... they're dead, Joshua. But they're not gone. They're at peace. They no longer feel pain or fear or loneliness. Your wife... she's with God now. You may not believe in God. You can choose to ignore what I'm saying, Joshua, but I hope you won't."

Murdock shook his head, staring at the black, unforgiving sky. Not many people believed in God anymore, not after thirty years of genocide. "How can you feel that way?" he asked.

"Because my family died on Reach," Conners said softly. "Life may seem hopeless after so much bad has happened. But there's always hope. We've got to pull through this. You _will _see them again. But not yet, Joshua. Not yet."

# # # # # # #

"Next... line FO-106. Send the pulse."

"Transmitting... done. Cutting the link."

A map of the facility's computer network filled the display. As they watched, a line on the map glowed yellow, then changed to dotted red, signifying that another connection in the network had been shut down. Jones and Miyagi were attempting to quarantine Quincy to an unused part of the network by first jamming the bandwidth of virtual links he could move through and then shutting down the link entirely. The challenge was in keeping Conners and Murdock from noticing any change in the network's performance and, more importantly, keeping Quincy out of the communications equipment. If they inadvertently shut down the equipment needed to establish the link to the surface, they would be cutting off any chance of calling for evacuation.

"Jam lines FO-115, 121 and 136. He's trying to slip around the blockade."

"Done. Cutting the links. He's in a server in section four, trying to negotiate a link to the mainframe."

"Request... denied, courtesy of BL-119. What's left?"

"All the fiber optics are closed, wireless is turned off... as far as I can tell, we've got him."

Miyagi leaned back in his chair and sighed. "I hope so."

Jones' chronometer chimed. "Time to hit the switch," he said, standing up to leave.

"Why don't you tell someone else what the code is, Jones?" Miyagi asked. "In Ackerson's absence, I _am_ the sitting director of operations in the base."

"I can't. Colonel's orders."

"Every five hours and forty-five minutes... when's the last time you had a full night's sleep?"

Jones stopped in the doorway. He wanted to be rid of the switch, more than anything else in the world. He had wondered many times what would happen if he let the clock run to zero, but he had been too frightened for his life. He had once given up hope of rescue and actually allowed it to reach the last seven seconds of the countdown before chickening out.

In that moment, it had hit him. He was a coward. He had run away, leaving three people in a situation that could have easily turned deadly. Even if they eventually forgave him, he could never forgive himself. His father would have been ashamed of him. Through some twist of fate, Conners had found a way to reestablish communications, giving them one string of hope to hang onto. Now he would have to keep resetting the switch until the day he died, waiting for rescue that could come days or years down the line.

There was something important about the switch, he knew. A dead man's switch was only supposed to hit zero if nobody was left to reset it. It was only supposed to go off if something went very, very wrong. He didn't know what that 'something' was. And that was even more frightening than the switch itself.

Even though he had been forty two light-years away on Earth, Colonel Ackerson had run everything in the Hall of the Mountain King. His regulations had been strict, and as far as Jones could tell, adhering to them was the only way to stay alive. He wasn't supposed to tell anyone what the code was and, according to Ackerson, he was to take his own life before letting it fall into another's hands. And he didn't want do die.

"I'm sorry, director," Jones said. "I could tell you... but then I'd have to kill you."

# # # # # # #

The lasergram transmitter swiveled 180 degrees around on its base, then 180 degrees straight up. Murdock half expected to see a green light shoot out of it towards the relay satellite in geosynchonous orbit overhead, but that would be ridiculous. The transmitter finished its work almost as quickly as it found the satellite. Before he knew it, Conners called again over the fiber optic line.

"That's it. It's done. You can come back now."

Murdock sat for a moment at the lip of the hole, hesitant to enter it again. How could he go back down there again, so soon after escaping that prison? It would be insane to want to go back... but no less crazy than wanting to stay on the surface, which was what he wanted to do.

_This was where Julia died_, he thought. _How can I leave her a second time?_

There was no body to bury, no way to put the memories to rest. Those on the surface had been boiled away as if they had never existed, but he could still sense them. He looked around, as if expecting to see the ghosts of Coral moving in the shadows. All he could see was rock, dust, glass, and darkness. Upon this ground there had been a great city, home to millions. Was there some part of the city that would still be recognizable? Or had it been destroyed so thoroughly that there wasn't a single brick on top of another? It couldn't _all_ be gone, could it?

As hellacious, twisted, and defunct as it was, it had been his home.

_Why has this happened?_ he thought. What had these people done to provoke such a reaction? What wrong had been committed against them that could ever justify such mindless destruction? Why do they hate us?

They had no right to do this.

Sitting in the darkness on Coral's surface, Murdock looked down the hole as if it were the gate to hell itself.

_Abandon hope, all ye who enter here._

Light shone down from above. Murdock looked up. Coral was beginning to move out of Vista's shadow, and the friendly glow of the belt began to grow back across the sky, like millions of tiny candles being lit, one by one. This was lost to Murdock, who tightened his fist in anger. The Covenant had done this. They had no right. He would make them pay in blood for what they had done. If it cost him his life, these people would be avenged.

Murdock climbed down the ladder again, taking one last look at the sky overhead before closing the gate and sealing himself in the darkness.

It was 12:00 AM.

# # # # # # #

_Day 7  
__The Final Day_

"I'm bored with this strong-arm, sitting duck shit. Let's make it a bit more interesting."

Keom 'Yerumee's eyes shot open, but all he saw was a blurry white light. Where was he? He heard a human voice, then that of an Unggoy. Yes, he was still in his cell, but the smell of electricity was gone. He blinked several times and sat up, holding his head. The last thing he remembered was the human guard spitting something on him. It was the vile substance the interrogator referred to as 'the sedative,' but the guard called alcohol. The guard had spat an entire mouthful of it on him, and by simply breathing it, he had lost consciousness. How long had he been out? And how could humans bear to _drink_ such a vile substance?

"We picked up your weapons when we captured you. They're being kept in the main lab on 'B' deck. If you get one of them, you get to use it. Best man wins. I'll even give you a ten second head start."

The major shook his head to clear his thoughts and looked directly in front of his cell. A red-armored grunt was standing there, petrified. Leaning closer to the bars, 'Yerumee could see the human guard holding it at gunpoint, clearly drunk.

"Nine."

The grunt held its arms out, pleading. "Me no harm! Me go back in cell, you put gun down! All happy, no die today! Eh?"

"Eight."

"We talk about this first?"

"Seven," Tyler said, lowering the shotgun and making a disappointed face. "C'mon, work with me here, will you?"

"Please? Me no-"

He raised the gun again. "Six. Get moving already."

The grunt trembled, its feet frozen to the floor. It looked helplessly to Keom 'Yerumee, who watched from his cell with a strange sense of giddy horror. "M- master?" the grunt said, "help? Help me!"

"Run, you fool!" 'Yerumee shouted. The grunt looked from the guard to the elite and back again before turning towards the door and running as fast as its stubby legs could carry it, but Blancett tracked its every move.

"Five... four... three..."

# # # # # # #

Laura Conners looked at the readouts from the slipspace probes. They had just completed their first dive with nothing to report in the slipstream, but the call for help was now out in the open. The most noteworthy images the probes had collected, however, were taken in normal space.

She studied the image of Coral's surface for a long time. She had seen pictures of glassed planets before, but those were long range, low-resolution images that had been hastily taken by fleeing human survivors. This was different. Rather than the heavy gray stormclouds that had once blanketed Coral, angry-looking clouds of off-red vapor boiled over the planet's surface. She recognized depressions in the ground where Coral's oceans had once been. But there were two things in the image that disturbed her more than anything. First, there was roughly a dozen Covenant ships still hovering over the planet.

Secondly, there was one part of the planet, roughly ten square kilometers, that the Covenant had spared.

She turned off her computer monitor. The last thing Murdock needed to see was what Coral's surface looked like in the daytime.

The sound of a distant gunshot echoed down the corridor.

# # # # # # #

The shaft sealed and pumps in the walls activated, equalizing the pressure in the room with that in the base and purifying the air. Joshua Murdock climbed to the bottom of the ladder and took off his helmet before the pressure fully equalized, leaving his ears ringing. He didn't care. He punched the override to the blast doors and they slid apart with a hiss of air to reveal Private Maria Cortez standing on the other side. She was about to speak, but Murdock interrupted.

"Your sidearm," Murdock said, holding out his hand. Cortez looked at him suspiciously for a moment and defensively placed a hand on her holstered M6C magnum.

"Sir?" she said, slightly nervous. Murdock was completely expressionless, and that scared Cortez more than anything else he had done to that point.

"_Private_," he said calmly, "your sidearm."

Cortez handed him the gun and stepped out of the way as Murdock made his way to the brig. He didn't look back.

# # # # # # #

Conners came to a stop just outside the brig, collecting her thoughts. She hadn't seen Tyler for nearly a week. Had he just shot himself? If he were still alive, he'd need immediate medical care. She typed the first two digits of the security code into the door before hesitating.

What if he had been shooting something else?

She shook her head. She had no way of knowing what had happened, but as the first responder, it was her responsibility to check on him.

Conners took a deep breath and entered the rest of the code. The steel door of the brig slid into the ceiling. Inside, Blancett was hauling the last grunt out of its cell, squealing in terror. Hearing Conners' entry, Blancett crouched behind it, holding an M6C magnum under the grunt's chin as if it were a hostage. Upon recognizing Conners, though, the man visibly relaxed and a twisted grin spread across his face.

Laura Conners' eyes widened as horrible realization hit.

"Tyler," she said, "don't-"

Tyler Blancett pulled the trigger. The top of the grunt's head blew off, spraying blue blood across the ceiling. Blancett tossed the little body to the deck and lowered the pistol, cackling.

"What are you gonna do now?" he said, half-shouting. "Huh? What are you gonna do about it, bitch?"

Laura Conners stared at Blancett in horror, unable to move. The man lightly kicked the grunt's body. "You see anything?" he asked.

"N- no," Conners said.

"Wrong answer," Blancett said, picking up the shotgun. Conners turned to run, but Blancett pumped the weapon, ejecting one unfired shell onto the floor and chambering another. "Who said you could leave?"

Conners stopped dead and slowly turned, holding up her hands defensively.

"Don't lie to me," Blancett said softly, grinning. "What did you see here?"

"Alright," she said, "I saw you kill it. Just... put the gun down... please..."

Blancett shouldered the gun. "Shut up! On your knees, now!"

Conners knelt on the deck, watching the grunt's thick blue blood drip through the grating in the floor.

"See this?" Tyler said, holding up his rotting left hand. Conners' mouth gaped in horror. "See this? What the fuck do _you _know, huh? I've gotta hand it to you for your doctoring. Really hit the spot. Time for me to return the favor."

In that moment, something about Conners changed. It was subtle, but it bothered Blancett. In another moment, he realized what it was that bothered him.

She wasn't afraid of him anymore.

He shook himself and brought his face down on the shotgun's stock again. "Let me ask you this," he said. "After all this bullshit, do you still believe in God?"

Laura Conners took in a slow, deep breath.

"Do you?" he repeated, leaning into the gun.

"Yes," Conners said.

"_Wrong answer!_"

The roar of the gunshot deafened Keom 'Yerumee, who watched as Conners doubled up on the floor and went still. He looked again at the human, smoke rising from the barrel of the shotgun. Tyler slowly lowered the shotgun. He had expected to feel a pang of remorse.

He felt nothing.

Keom 'Yerumee did not know why, but he felt bad for the human that had just been killed. He glared at Tyler, who was taking a long drink of the vile clear liquid, letting some of it spill down his shirt. This human was not like the others. He felt no compassion, no remorse, and neither followed authority or cared about his own people anymore. From stress or claustrophobia or hatred, perhaps all three, he had lost his mind.

Blancett wiped his mouth and his eyes shifted to the major, who glared defiantly from his cell. Blancett swallowed the potentially lethal dose of ethyl alcohol in his mouth and threw the container across the room where it shattered against the wall. "What are you looking at, you split-chinned son of a bitch?" he spat, staggering towards 'Yerumee's cell. He pointed the shotgun at the major's head, clumsily chambering another shell.

"You have made a foul, twisted game out of executing my subordinates, human. I expect nothing more of you than to do the same to me," 'Yerumee said. "But I, unlike you, do not fear death."

Blancett's bloodshot eyes twitched, processing this information. There was fear there, behind the hatred. "You know what," Blancett said, "you're right. It won't do much good if I kill you, now, will it? Not if you're gonna be so high-and-mighty about it. Nah, I won't make a martyr of you. Besides, I just got a better idea."

He turned around and aimed the shotgun at Ilion 'Hoksatee. 'Yerumee's eyes widened in horror.

"Master," 'Hoksatee breathed. The gun roared again. When the cloud of blue smoke cleared, 'Yerumee saw his apprentice lying in his cell without a head. Blancett laughed out loud. 'Yerumee charged against the bars of his cell, reaching between them and grabbing Blancett's belt from behind. He pulled the screaming man towards his cell, grabbing Blancett's left hand and slamming it against the side of the door with enough force to break the man's wrist. The shotgun dropped to the floor as 'Yerumee slammed Blancett's hand against the touch pad again and held it there. The device read a signal from the chip implanted in the guard's palm and obediently opened the cell door.

'Yerumee lost his grip on Blancett as he pulled his arm back through the metal gridwork of the rising bars, but Blancett dove and picked up the dropped shotgun. He raised it in 'Yerumee's general direction and pulled the trigger, hearing a light metallic click. The weapon hadn't been pumped. The spent shell that had killed 'Hoksatee was still in the chamber. Thinking that the gun was empty, Blancett saw the 8-gauge shotgun shell he had thoughtlessly ejected from the gun and reached for it, but the Sangheili major grabbed him and hauled him screaming off of the floor.

Blancett was lifted a foot into the air by the elite, whose clawlike hand clutched his throat. He kicked uselessly, struggling to breathe. Keom 'Yerumee held the squirming man from behind with both arms and looked again at the dead body of his apprentice, shot in his cell like a caged animal. Growling with fury, 'Yerumee dug his fingers deep into the man's neck and pulled with all his strength.

Tyler barely felt it.

# # # # # # #

Joshua Murdock skidded to a halt on the titanium-A floor outside the brig and punched in his code. He placed a round in the M6C's chamber as the door slid open. He aimed the gun in the room, but for several seconds he stood still, taking in the scene in utter horror.

The walkway that ran between the two rows of cells was littered with the bodies of a man, a woman, and two grunts. In a shock of recognition, he ran to Laura Conners' side, rolling her over. There was a large, bloody wound in her abdomen.

She was dead.

Murdock closed her eyes and buried his head in his hand, taking several deep breaths. He wiped the sweat off his forehead, covering his mouth. She had been killed with a shotgun.

Tyler. That son of a bitch!

Murdock tightened his hand into a fist and stood up, walking over to him. Blancett lay there on the floor, face-down. Rage overpowering reason, Murdock kicked him three times, hard. The third time, the body rolled over. Murdock jumped back in horror, falling backwards into Keom 'Yerumee's empty cell. He sat back up and looked again at Blancett. He was dead, too, and as far as Murdock could tell, his entire throat had been ripped out. Murdock looked around the cell, realizing that it was empty, and pushed himself to his feet. He stepped back up onto the walkway. In the cell across from 'Yerumee's, the elite minor lay dead. Cortez entered the room as Murdock walked down the row looking into each cell. There were no other Covenant prisoners alive.

One was missing.

# # # # # # #

Keom 'Yerumee picked up his plasma rifle reverently. For too long he had not had a weapon in his hands. He looked at the weapon's blue-purple finish, staring into the beautiful greenish glow of the weapon's energy core. With this, he could purge the world of all evil; purify it of those who refused the truth of the Great Journey. For too long he had lived at the mercy of the humans. He would not be so merciful. He longed to avenge his murdered apprentice. Now was his chance.

He looked to the human scientist cowering in the corner, then to the green crystal on the table. The human had had the nerve to touch the Holy Light? 'Yerumee wanted nothing more than to slay the pathetic creature and move on, but seeing the death of his apprentice made him all the more wary of his own mortality. He had more important objectives.

The Prophets were beginning to show favor to the Jiralhanae over the Sangheili. The Covenant was prepared to break. High Charity itself had become a battlefield as assassinations and murders became more and more frequent. His own sister's first-born had been murdered by a Jiralhanae - within a stone's throw of the Step of Silence! Yet the Prophets had done nothing.

Through desparate diplomatic action, the High Council had managed insofar to prevent all-out civil war. War against the humans had been escalated even more in hopes that the Covenant's unity would remain strong. After the fall of Reach, however, it grew apparent that the humans were running out of strongholds. The Council's solution was temporary at best. Both the Sangheili and the Jiralhanae were actively looking for a way to tip the scales. 'Yerumee had hoped that discovering the Forerunner vault at the human dig site would be enough, but by some twist of fate, his capture by the humans had led him to the prize he needed to save his people.

The Holy Light was a treasure worthy enough to tip the scales. One way or another, it would end up in the hands of the Hierarchs. Were it to come to them from a Sangheili warrior, his people would again be seen with favor. On the other hand, if Tartarus, the Jiralhanae Chieftain, were to get his claws on it...

It was 'Yerumee's duty to his people to bring it to the Prophets. For the sake of his family, he had to. It was the cause his apprentice had died for, and it was his responsibility to honor that death. Even if it meant letting this human live, 'Yerumee had to reach the Covenant forces that would be investigating the dig site. He needed to escape the facility alive. He would not kill the human. Not yet, anyway, until it had shown him the way out. Some would consider it heresy, but hopefully his heresy would be outweighted by recovering the artifact.

Esko Korpijaakko recoiled into the corner between two cannisters of compressed air, sitting on the floor. He touched his forehead, sticky with blood that wasn't his. It had been on the elite's hand. The elite hadn't even had a gun, but it had somehow managed to kill someone already. He had been thrown across the room by the red-armored elite, and watched from between the air tanks as it collected a plasma rifle and a few grenades, then stacked the rest of them in the corner. It paused for a moment, reverently looking at the crystal. The elite began touching symbols on the crystal. They lit up as they were touched. Esko knew how volatile the artifact was, and waited in horror for some ungodly energy to pour out of it and kill them both. It didn't. The elite finished its work, and the light show within the crystal sped up.

Then the elite then turned on him.

Esko tried to squeeze back further into the corner, but the elite simply reached between the tanks and dragged him out, effortlessly lifting him off the floor. Esko jabbered in terror, and when he tried to break the elite's grip, it simply squeezed his shoulder harder, clawlike fingers breaking his skin. Keom 'Yerumee peeked into the corridor outside the lab. No other humans were visible, but the Major had a dilemma. Was he to hold the human in one hand and the crystal in the other, proceeding through the halls unarmed? That would be suicide.

It appeared that he would have to commit a second heresy.

The Major let go of Esko. The man clutched his shoulder in pain, but knew better to run. Esko stared as the elite shoved the green crystal in his hands and pushed him forward. He felt heat on the back of his neck as the elite aimed at him with the plasma rifle.

"You are to lead me to the site of the excavation, human," 'Yerumee said. "Do not pretend you known not of what I speak."

Esko nodded dumbly, staring into the fist-sized crystal in his hand. Something was different about it now. There was no longer a tesseract etched inside the crystal.

There was a cube.

# # # # # # #

Jones shook his head. He couldn't have heard that right. Could he?

"I repeat, we have a Covenant elite loose in the facility," Murdock said through the intercom. "Two people are already KIA. Can you find him on the security monitors?"

Jones hit the intercom button. "No, we can't. Quincy went rampant and shut them down to minimize the amount of input he was receiving. I can lock down almost any door in the base, but I have no idea where to start."

"Shut down the elevators. All of them. Lock down every door that's more than two hundred yards from the brig. We have to secure the main lab on 'B' deck, secure the crystal. God knows what he could do with it."

"'B' deck," Jones said. Sweat broke out on his forehead. That lab was directly overhead.

"What weapons do we ha-"

A massive blue explosion tore a hole in the ceiling at the far corner of the room as plasma grenades chain-reacted with each other. Jones was thrown against his console by the force of the blast, but save for a few lacerations, he was unharmed. The communications console spat sparks, as he saw that a chunk of Titanium-A plating has sliced into the console less than a foot from his head. Jones coughed and shakily stood up, looking through the hole that had appeared in the ceiling. The walls of the lab were stained black from carbon scoring.

Jones remembered that when the covenant prisoners were captured, their weapons had been take to that lab. They had been stacked together and destroyed by the plasma grenades. The elite had taken what it needed and destroyed the rest.

It was now armed.

# # # # # # #

Murdock and Cortez heard the explosion and immediately moved towards it. Murdock was armed with both M6C magnums, and Cortez had taken Blancett's shotgun, the only human weapons in the base. She wished now more than ever that she had grabbed her BR55 from the warthog before coming down the elevator. The elite's personal energy shield system had been disabled, but that did not make the lack of automatic weapons any more comforting. Hearing the explosion, they quickly moved towards the lab, cautiously aiming down every hallway they passed. There was no one in sight.

The entrance to the lab was in a T-section. Murdock entered his override code into the door as Cortez warily aimed her gun down the corridor, watching three directions of approach at once. The door opened with the squeal of straining metal, finally jamming when it was half-open. Murdock squeezed into the room, nearly stepping on the smouldering shell of what had once been a Covenant needler. The stockpile of Covenant weapons was gone, along with Esko and the Crystal.

"Hey!" Jones shouted. Murdock looked down the hole in the floor, staying clear of its semi-molten edges.

"Go to the Core," Murdock said. "Get Miyagi to lock down every door within a hundred yards of here. He couldn't have gotten far. And tell him he's got a hostage."

Murdock tossed one of his M6C magnums through the hole to Jones. "Be careful," he said.

"Right," Jones said, leaving the room.

Blue-green plasma splashed across the wall outside the lab. Cortez crouched and aimed her shotgun at Keom 'Yerumee, who held Esko in front of him, firing over the man's shoulder. Cortez couldn't fire at that range without hitting him. Murdock aimed out of the half-open door of the lab, firing twice. 50-caliber HE rounds blew craters into the titanium-A wall behind the Major, who nimbly leapt out of the way. Cortez and Murdock gave chase, but a lockdown door sealed them off. Cortez leaned around the corner, aiming intently at the lockdown door as Murdock entered an override code on a panel on the wall to open it. The door slid open.

The corridor was empty, but it terminated at the far end with another blast door. Murdock hit the intercom. "We've got him corraled on 'B' deck. Jones, Miyagi, get up here!"

"There's ten rooms," Cortez said. "We'll have to check every one of them."

"I'll go in first," Murdock replied. He checked his ammunition. He only had one clip. Shaking his head, he proceeded down the hallway, hugging the wall.

They came to the first door. Murdock looked through the peephole, but the glass was curved so he could not see inside. There was nothing to say the major wasn't just hiding besides the door. It was what _he_ would.

_What I'd give for some flashbangs,_ Murdock thought. He entered the Section Zero clearance code into the door. It slid open with a slight hiss as the air pressure equalized in the room. Cortez leaned in the room, sweeping the corners with her shotgun. It was empty.

"Next one," she said.

Murdock looked down the hallway, bringing up the schematic of the facility in his mind. He lost his air of caution and walked over to the seventh door in the hallway, with Cortez following in confusion. Murdock scrutinized the door. There was no glass eye to allow people to look out. Instead, there was a large, colorful warning.

A biohazard warning.

"Why are we skipping all of these other rooms?"

"This one," Murdock said. "They're in this one."

"Why?"

"Because according to base schematics, it doesn't exist." Murdock entered his Section Zero override code into the keypad. It flashed red. The door didn't budge.

Cortez whipped around, hearing footsteps behind them. Murdock didn't even turn to look.

"Care to explain this, Miyagi?" he said.

"I'm afraid that I've created a new clearance for you, Lieutenant," Miyagi replied. "You have been quite persistent in your attempts to hack into information that you have no business with, and I've permitted it. But in Colonel Ackerson's absence, I am the official Director of Operations in this facility. And you are _not_ going into that laboratory."

Murdock walked over to Miyagi and calmly pointed his M6C at the man's face. "Officially," he said, "we're all dead already. So if I blow your head off right now, the rest of the world will never know about it, and I will hack the code anyway. In this room there is an elite with a weapon of unspeakable power, and it has no idea how to use it. Pretty soon, it will start pushing buttons, and I doubt you will want to be here when that happens. So open the door."

Miyagi sighed. He walked over to the door and entered a ten-digit code. The door slid into the ceiling, and a single klaxon sounded in the hallway. Murdock entered the dark room, and instantly the lights came on full. There was a second door at the other end of the room, lined on both sides by computers and gene sequencers. Murdock's attention fell on an aquarium in the wall, filled with cloudy brown fluid. He cautiously walked over to the tank, and at once a strange bulbous creature cut through the fog within and pressed itself hungrily against the bulletproof glass. Murdock reeled back in surprise and disgust.

It was roughly the size of a football, with a mess of brown tentacles and a bulbous pack of yellow-green fluid making up most of its body. It continued to push against the glass with what could only be ravenous hunger.

_What the hell is this?_ he thought. _Could this be what the _Applebee _was coming for?_

He stepped back from the tank, looking to the closed door opposite the entrance to the lab. He placed his hand on the second door's motor casing. It was warm. The elite had gone through there.

"Open it," Murdock said.

Miyagi hesitantly entered the code to the door. There was a hiss of air, and for a few seconds, nothing happened. Then, locks clicked into place and the door motors engaged. Slowly, laborously, the slab of titanium-A was lifted out of the way. Murdock and Cortez went prone, aiming their guns inside and waiting for plasma to come sizzling through the door.

It didn't.

The door pulled up into the ceiling, and stopped. A chill ran up Murdock's spine as he stood, cautiously pointing his puny handgun down the dark path.

Thick, stinking air poured into the room. Long tendrils of dry, pale moss hung down from the ceiling of the tunnel, hewn from solid rock by tools unknown to man. A small, dark shape skittered across the ground, vanishing in a hole in the rock. There were no titanium walls, no lights, no visible equipment. No sign of human activity at all, save for a set of human footprints and another of larger hooves leading down a dirt trail into darkness.


	7. Pathways into Darkness

**Chapter Six:  
****Pathways into Darkness**

"Okay," Murdock said, "what weapons do we have?"

"You're not seriously thinking about going down there, are you?" Jones said, his eyes widening in fear.

Murdock stared at him blankly.

"Hell, no," Jones said. "I don't know about you, but I'm staying!"

"I'll go," Cortez said.

"I need you to stay here," Murdock said. "Someone needs to keep the door open, and I sure as hell don't trust Miyagi to do it. I'm the interrogator. If I-"

Cortez frowned. "You saw Blancett's throat. He's _through_ negotiating. I'm the only one here with combat experience. You want me to stay here, make me."

Murdock shook his head, checking the ammunition in his weapon. The elite's energy shield generator had been removed from its armor, but even without shields, Murdock didn't like the odds of hunting it down and killing it. But they couldn't let it get away. They _couldn't_. If it started playing around with the crystal, there was no telling what might happen. On top of that, the elite had taken one of their own with him. They couldn't abandon Esko to death. His conscience wouldn't stand for it.

He only had two clips of ammunition for his M6C, one of which was half empty. He looked at the others, seeing only a shotgun and another magnum between them.

"Jones, what weapons do we have?"

"You're looking at them," Jones said. "Two M6 magnums with forty rounds between them and one shotgun with twenty shells. Shotty's pretty much useless if he's got a hostage. Too damned inaccurate at any kind of range."

"And he destroyed all of the Covenant weaponry that he couldn't carry," Miyagi said. "Smart son of a bitch."

"Alright," Murdock said. "Jones, take an M6 and keep the door open for us. If the son of a bitch doubles back here, pop him. Anyone got a radio?"

"Here," Miyagi said, "two headsets."

"Good enough. Cortez, flashlights?"

"Check."

"Alright," he said. "Jones, Miyagi, we will maintain constant communication with the base. We'll call you. You don't call us. No need to lose surprise, but if you don't hear from us... seal the door."

"Got it," Jones said.

Murdock looked down the rock tunnel and took a deep breath. "You ready?"

"Yeah," Cortez said, pumping the shotgun.

"Let's go."

Cortez and Murdock walked through the door, switching on their flashlights in the fading light. The tunnel extended straight for twenty meters, with lengths of dry pale moss hanging from the ceiling. The tunnel was clearly artificial. Though worn by untold ages of seismic activity and who-knew what else, it had still been clearly carved in the shape of a hexagon for its entire length. Murdock saw a number of small holes pitted through the tunnel walls and crouched down, shining his flashlight into one of them. The volleyball-sized hole extended out of sight into the darkness, but it seemed that the material that formed the tunnel walls was only about a foot thick. As the light from the laboratory faded away behind them, static crackled over the headset.

"Come in. This is Miyagi, do you read?"

"Copy, base, loud and clear," Cortez said. They saw that the tunnel up ahead split in two directions, with hoofprints in the thin dirt leading down the tunnel to the right.

"Are you having trouble tracking them?"

"Negative, their tracks are clearly visible." Besides the hoofprints, the dirt seemed to be dotted with hundreds; thousands of smaller prints. Like someone had poked the ground with a small stick. Odd. There was a strange sucking sound echoing through the tunnels, like water rushing through a pipe. Cortez silently hoped that the tunnels weren't flooded.

Miyagi cleared his throat, but over the static it sounded like something being dropped. "I just wanted to say that I've been spelunking before and there's a couple of things you should keep in mi-"

The radio transmission cut out entirely, leaving only static. Cortez and Murdock stopped dead. Murdock took off his headset, shaking it and checking the batteries. The headset was fine, but there was no incoming signal. How was that possible? Even underground, they were only a hundred feet away from the lab. Murdock turned, and a splash of static revealed the sound of a human voice. Looking back up the tunnel they had come from, Murdock held his radio out at arms length, back in line of sight of the tunnel.

"-never grab onto any kind of vegetation when climbing, and always stay in each other's sight."

Murdock shook his head and spoke into his microphone. "Sorry, Miyagi, it looks like the radios aren't going to be any help. All we've done is turn a corner and we've already lost the signal."

They looked at the rock walls in confusion. The rocks absorbed radio waves. What kind of mineral could _do_ that?

Cortez motioned over her shoulder, shining her flashlight down the next tunnel, and began walking again with her shotgun raised. Murdock followed, turning off his radio. A few feet more, and no more light was visible from the lab. They were on their own.

# # # # # # #

The two men watched as the flashlights disappeared into the darkness of the tunnels, with Jones nervously pointing his gun down the shaft. He knew that the elite's eyes would be adjusted to the dark, and if it decided to come back, it would see him before he could see it. He instinctively took a few steps away from the tunnel, but Miyagi stepped in front of him, looking into the blackness without fear. He gently set down his radio on a table next to the door and turned to Jones.

"What if he finds the..."

"There's miles of tunnels down there. More than we know of. The colonel got what he wanted, and there was no need for further exploration. The likelihood that they'll find the facility is next to nothing, and the likelihood that they'll find and kill the elite is even less. It's a fool's errand. Esko is gone. But we can still save ourselves, and the project."

"But the Chimera initiative..." Jones looked at the bulbous creature in the bulletproof aquarium, "I don't even know what the hell that thing _is_. What does Ackerson want with it?"

"Need to know basis. It was not our place to ask. Even _I_ do not know. But this is our last chance." Miyagi turned away from Jones, looking down the tunnel. "We're rid of them," he said. "We lock the door. It can't be opened from in the tunnel. The elite will then be trapped, and secrecy will remain unbroken."

"You don't mean..." Jones said, his head swimming, "Murdock?"

"Yes, I mean Murdock. We lock them down there. Sooner or later a ship will come for us, and HYPODERMIC will be a success."

"But..." Jones looked over Miyagi's shoulder down the foreboding tunnel, "you mean to _leave_ them there to die?"

"They're a _security risk_," Miyagi said. "If we ever get off this planet and return to human space; if we let word reach Section Zero about what the Colonel was doing here, he will kill us both, don't you understand? And if not the Colonel, I would severely doubt that Section Zero would let us go our merry way."

"I... but the doctor and the marine!" Jones blurted, "how can we just..."

"Collateral damage, I'm afraid," the director said, "but given our situation, I feel that we have no choice. Nobody else will ever know."

_It was happening again_, Jones realized. Three human lives were hanging in the balance, and again his decision would seal their fates. He remembered how he had run away to reset the switch when three people - the same people! - had been risking their lives in the elevator shaft. How could he let it happen again?

Miyagi walked over to the control panel and began typing the code to seal the door.

"No," Jones said.

The director continued typing the override code. Jones forced his hand, pointing the M6C magnum at the back of Miyagi's head.

"Stop, right now!"

Miyagi stood still for several seconds before turning. He stared emotionlessly at the communications technician. "Stay out of my way," he said. "Stay out of my way if you wish to live. This is a difficult decision. Nobody is saying that it isn't. But if you do not let me close this door, you've sealed our fates. After all, we are all dead men."

"S- step away from the console!"

Miyagi smirked. "Do you really think that you would be able to bring down that elite if he came back here? Hmm?"

# # # # # # #

Private Cortez lightly kicked something on the ground. Surprised, she shone her flashlight at the floor. It was a hollow cone, roughly three inches in diameter. Its consistency looked like it was made out of wood, but that wasn't possible, was it? She nudged it again with her foot, and it rolled a ways down the tunnel towards Murdock, who was trying to pick up on the elite's trail again. They had passed a Y-intersection where there was no dirt on the rock. The elite could have gone either way, but they chose to search the right tunnel first.

A gust of air came down from above. Cortez and Murdock both looked up, their flashlights giving the hanging tendrils of moss in the vertical shaft an eerie blue glow. The whispy moss swayed like a spider web in the wind, but the light from their flashlights was lost in the darkness overhead.

"Could they have climbed up there?" Murdock thought aloud.

"No. We don't have climbing equipment, they don't have it either. The trail has to stay level."

Murdock turned his attention to the path again, seeing that it ended in a room at the end of the tunnel. They would have to check it out. His foot kicked something as he started walking again, but looking down, he saw nothing but another of the strange conical tubes that littered the entire floor of the cave system. He then looked towards the wall.

He saw in the darkness several thick rods sticking out of the ground. He squinted at them briefly, believing them to be a cluster of tree roots. Impossible. Moss, maybe, but complex plant life this far underground? He casually shone his flashlight over them. For an instant several pearly black pebbles shone in the light, but then the rods disappeared with lightning speed into a previously-unnoticed hole in the base of the wall. Legs!

He jumped back in shock, bumping into Cortez.

"What are you-"

"Shh! Listen!" Murdock said, aiming his flashlight at the hole.

A scuffling sound echoed through the tunnel, like a cardboard tube being rapidly hit against a table. Echoing through the chamber, the sound seemed to come from everywhere.

"Whatever's _living _down here, I'd rather not find out," Cortez said.

"Right... right. Let's keep moving." It was only then that Murdock realized what he had truly seen: an arthropod the size of a full-grown tortoise.

# # # # # # #

Soft jazz poured out of the speakers over the thrumming of the engines. A picture of a man, a woman, and a teenage boy with unkempt hair rested on a shelf above the single cot in the relatively cramped room. Corporal Jason Morelli of ONI's Radio Beacon Deployment Program sat on the cot with his back to the wall, reading an operations manual and tapping his fingers on the page to the sound of the beat. He could have called up the material in the book on his palmtop, but there was something about reading an old-fashion bound stack of paper that he enjoyed. It seemed more real. Though the commander didn't really approve of the practice, it didn't effect his performance and she had no reason to correct him. He did his job, and he did it well. Not much else mattered.

The UNSC _Soberg_ was an aging vessel, a retrofitted ONI prowler first commissioned in 2523. It was one of many ships that the Navy had shucked off in favor of the latest and greatest technology. Though the _Soberg_ sported state-of-the-art communications equipment for reading signals in the slipstream, it had one of the oldest operational slipspace drives in service. Unlike the corporal, Tech Sergeant Wally Grisham was kept far more busy, making sure that the ship would be able to handle each consecutive jump.

Around every human-occupied system, there were hundreds of millions of cubic miles of space that had to be monitored at all times. After all, if the Covenant were to attack a planet, what was to say they would even approach on the plane of the ecliptic? Early detection and interception was humanity's best defense, and that required TACSATS... _lots_ of them.

The _Soberg _was one of hundreds of ships assigned to this duty, and crucial though it was to humanity's survival, there really wasn't much to do on the tiny ship. But whenever a curious signal was intercepted, it led to tense moments. It could be a distant pulsar or quasar... or it could be an approaching Covenant ship.

Which was why the corporal shot up and promptly smacked his head on the shelf above him when the alert sounded.

Holding his head, Corporal Jason Morelli sat down at the computer terminal in his quarters and typed intermittently. After a few moments, the signal became clear: it was a modulated-frequency radio message being sent through the slipstream. He looked at the curious sine wave on the display. He recognized the encryption: ONI Section Three. Tracing it through the slipstream back to its source, his eyes widened.

Coral.

# # # # # # #

Light shone into the room for the first time in decades, a distinct beam cutting through the haze of dust that choked the musty chamber. Murdock and Cortez slipped down the wall into the room, surprised to find that the hexagonal tunnel entered the room halfway up the wall. The room was roughly six meters high, and the floor was littered with dry, crusty remains.

Human remains.

Cortez knelt down next to one of the twenty or so skeletons, arranged in a circle on the floor.

"What in God's name," she muttered.

"What is it?" Murdock asked, looking at the skeleton over her shoulder.

"Just take a look at these! The skeletal structure is completely warped. Look at his arm. It's..."

Cortez covered her mouth and coughed. She didn't know where to start. The body had been pulverized. The man looked like his back had been broken, his bottom jaw ripped off, his collarbone snapped in two places, his ribs caved in. All of the bones were brittle, as if plagued by osteoporosis, but worst of all, the left arm didn't even look remotely human anymore. The bone was broken in so many places that she was surprised they hadn't blown away, but beyond that, it appeared to be twice as long as it should have been, with fingers almost as long as the arm. Mutilated beyond description. She stood up and backed away in disgust.

"Ritualistic executions?" Murdock speculated, but as the words came out of his mouth he knew they were wrong. No _human_ could do this. No human _would_ do this.

"I don't even want to know," Cortez said. "How long do you think they've been here?"

"I remember reading that the Hall of the Mountain King wasn't built by ONI. It was a group of independents, before the UNSC came to this system, before the Covenant was discovered. They were a resurgence of the Freidan movement; neo-fascists. They built the facility, but then they abandoned it. Vanished without a trace. Thirty years ago."

Cortez looked at the skeletonized bodies, seeing that one had been messily disassembled. Something, be it thirty years or thirty minutes ago, had been _eating_ it. The dried husk of a dead arachnid of some type was curled up in the corner, a foot-wide mass of tubular legs... legs shaped exactly like the cones they had been seeing on the ground.

"Let's go," she said, "let's go, let's go right now!"

"You're right," Murdock said, "let's go back. We'll try the other path."

# # # # # # #

Jason Morelli scrambled up a ladder and into a hallway, nearly running into Tech Sergeant Wally Grisham.

"Whoa, Jason, what's going on?"

"I just received a transmission from Coral. An encrypted _human_ transmission."

"Impossible. It has to be time lag. It couldn't have been sent after the Covies burned it."

"We're too close. At this range, we would have received it days ago if it had been sent out _before_ the glassing," Morelli said, "it was sent _after_ the planet was glassed. I think we're dealing with survivors."

"You've got to be kidding me!"

"Where's Keyes? I need to talk to her right away!"

Grisham grimaced. "Last I saw she was on the horn with STRATCOM."

Jason's spirits fell. A month ago, the commander had requested a transfer to the newly commissioned destroyer _In Amber Clad_, but as yet, there had been no word from the brass.

"She just got the word. Her father was killed in action."

"Oh, God..." Jason said, turning to head for the bridge. Captain Jacob Keyes had last been reported leaving Reach on a classified mission, and there had been no contact with the _Pillar of Autumn_ since its departure. Everyone had been waiting and hoping for her sake. Now that hope was gone.

Jason Morelli came to a stop outside the bridge and knocked on the door once. "Miranda?" he called.

There was a second's pause. "Come in," she replied.

Jason opened the door. Lieutenant Commander Miranda Keyes sat in the pilot's seat with her hand over her mouth. Her eyes were watering and her face was red, but she was staying very composed. Jason stood in the door for a moment, unsure of how to tell her what he had learned.

"I heard... about Jacob. He was a good man," Jason said. "I'm sorry."

"Don't," Keyes said, "don't be. He did his duty." She wiped her eyes and turned the chair around, slowly standing up. Something had died inside her, and Jason wasn't sure if she would ever be the same. As far as the corporal knew, she and her father had not been particularly close in recent years due to their separation in the service, but her father had been everything to her growing up after her mother's death on Jericho VII.

Lieutenant Commander Miranda Keyes had graduated at the top of her class at Annapolis and had wanted to command a fighting ship, but following the battle for Sigma Octanus, her father had seen to it that she was assigned to a position out of harm's way; the signal corp. She had never forgiven him, but if he hadn't done it, she likely would have been on Reach when it fell.

"I'm sorry," she said. She wiped her face and brushed down her uniform to make herself presentable. "What did you need?"

Corporal Jason Morelli swallowed. "There's something I think you should know about."

# # # # # # #

For thirty minutes they wandered through the endless tunnels following the footprints of a kidnapped man and the killer who had taken him. Three times the tracks led to a dead end and turned around, but the sound of sucking water was growing continuously louder, and as they passed through a thick mat of hanging moss, Cortez and Murdock finally identified the source of the noise.

The ground was wet. Down one small hole in the ground they could see water rushing past in an underground stream, flowing towards the center of the room. Hearing dripping water in the darkness, Cortez pointed her flashlight straight up. It glinted off of metal. A square plate of titanium-A was bolted to the ceiling, twenty feet overhead. It was bolted from the inside.

"I guess that explains the chaotic floor plan," Cortez said.

Murdock's mouth hung open in shock. It answered some questions. The Hall of the Mountain King had been built inside pre-existing tunnels... _these_ tunnels.

But who had built the original tunnel system? And for what purpose?

The plate of titanium-A in the ceiling was hanging there by two corners, with a two-ton steel girder having slammed into it from above with terrific force and partially dislodged it from its bolts. A small part of the elevator cable snaked out from the plate of titanium-A that had once been the bottom of the elevator shaft.

Murdock looked down from the ceiling and shone his light around on the floor of the chamber. At least a dozen of the strange arachnids scattered the second the light hit them, retreating to various burrows in the wall. The clattering sound of hollow legs faded away into the darkness, leaving only the sound of dripping water.

"Jesus," Cortez muttered, "I _hate _spiders!"

The chamber was roughly seventy feet across, with a large pool of water directly below the elevator shaft. Murdock realized immediately that it was not a natural formation, but a collecting pool. It was lined with layers of hexagonal mud bricks to keep the water in. As he shone his flashlight over the water, another of the spider-crabs skittered away, but three more sat by the water's edge, drinking. This they accomplished by dipping their hollow legs into the pool and allowing them to fill with water.

Without so much as making a ripple, something surfaced in the pond. Multiple long, feather-like tentacles snaked out of the deep. The gossamer creature didn't shy away from the light. As Murdock and Cortez watched, a tentacle stung one of the drinking spider-crabs and yanked it into the water with surprising strength as the others scattered. Cortez raised her shotgun in shock as another tentacle, three times longer, felt around on the ground for another victim. The venomous tentacle came within feet of them as they backed towards the wall, but it then slipped back into the water as quickly as it had emerged, barely making a ripple.

The immediate threat gone, a few of the arachnids ventured back out for a drink.

"What the _fuck_ are those things?" Cortez whispered loudly.

Murdock shook his head in disbelief, but there was no avoiding the conclusion. "Indigenous life," he said.

They quickly ducked out of the room, still following the clearly-defined footprints of the fugitive Elite. Occasionally there were deviations, but the trail seemed to follow a set path leading in the same general direction.

The direction to the dig site.

# # # # # # #

One by one, twenty Unggoy and thirty Sangheili warriors entered a large gravlift leading hundreds of feet down. Exli 'Uqsotee stepped into the band of light, preparing himself for the wrenching nausea that he had always experienced in gravlifts. He noticed that he was passing many levels, but he did not seem to be slowing down at all. As he proceeded further underground, he developed a theory in his mind. He reached one foot forward... and the gravlift softly ejected him onto a solid metal deck, two hundred meters below Coral's surface. He could see his reflection in the polished floor of the sterile Forerunner facility. As the insolent Fieldmaster, 'Putnamee, floated by him down the gravlift, the green-armored elite stopped to study a holographic display. It showed Halo, spinning slowly and marked with several ruinic symbols along its circumference. Exli thought for a moment. This could be the break he was looking for.

What, after all, could be a better prize for the Prophets than discovering another Halo?

He had not heard back from Fleetmaster 'Daulanee, who had departed the system along with the Prophet of Regret the day before. It was unlikely that they had even reached High Charity yet. 'Uqsotee did not envy the Fleetmaster by any means. The thought of remaining on the glassed planet was far more appealing than travelling to the crushed remains of Halo, so recently destroyed by the demon. 'Uqsotee had originally been skeptical about the reports of the demon's feats in combat, but following the _Unyielding Hierophant's_ destruction, his perspective was changing.

He was no longer single-mindedly focused on research. He had become a political power player almost overnight. Much was at stake if the Sangheili did not soon regain the Prophet's favor, but even when considering his people's failure at Halo, 'Uqsotee was unsure if the Prophets even _wanted _to associate with the Sangheili people anymore.

There was no safe way to transmit his concerns to the High Council, but Exli felt that a better course of action would be to evacuate all Sangheili civilians out of High Charity and to gear up for the coming civil war, rather than buying time with fruitless searches for Forerunner artifacts or exhausting the Covenant's resources by further escalating war against the humans. The Covenant was prepared to break. War would come, and nothing could prevent it. The least his people could do was prepare.

'Uqsotee was certain that the Prophets of Supposition and Regret knew more about the Forerunner facility on Coral than they let on, and had the distinct impression that there was something here they did not want him to find. What that was, though, the scientist had no idea. For the first time, 'Uqsotee felt that his research time was worthless. His people would reap no benefit from it, as the Prophet of Supposition would ultimately take credit for anything he found. And that made him feel helpless. For all the burden that was placed upon him by his people, he was ultimately a pawn.

His _true_ discovery he would have to keep secret from Supposition if he were to be of any assistance to the High Council. In the depths of the facility, he had discovered a lexicon which he had studied fervently for hours. After ages of fruitless decryption, it was now possible to read Forerunner writings. It made him privy to information that had been kept to the Hierarchs themselves, and his advancement through the facility was constantly slowed as he stopped to read something else. He had learned much about the Forerunners through their own writings that he had not previously suspected, some of which deviated from the teachings of the Covenant. Was this what the prophets had wished to conceal from him? Or did the facility harbor a greater danger?

Absently, the scientist opened a compartment in his armor, retrieving the red Forerunner crystal concealed within. It was polyhedral, small enough to cup in one hand, and emitted a strange light of his own. Since discovering the lexicon, he had taken to the habit of collecting any artifact which was small enough to carry out of the facility without being noticed. Most would be categorized and reported per the standard procedure so as to avoid suspicion, but this one was unique. He still questioned the wisdom of bringing the artifact back with him, but if the prophets were to be allowed secrets, he decided, he would allow this one to himself. Should the worst come to pass, there was no telling what could become of use to defend his people. As Exli stared into the crystal, an angry-looking gold-armored elite shot up the gravlift behind him, grabbing onto the floor as he passed by and hanging upside-down with his feet lifted straight over his head by the wave of inverted gravity. 'Putnamee pulled himself forward with his arms, clumsily dragging himself out of the pillar of antigravity. Upon doing so, his legs came crashing down on the polished floor with a loud smack. Groaning, the Fieldmaster shook himself to regain his bearings and glared at Exli 'Uqsotee's back. Sensing the ornery Fieldmaster's presence behind him, Exli quietly slipped the red crystal into a compartment in his armor and turned his attention back to the holographic console before him.

"What is this," the Fieldmaster said, "you make me conduct a day's worth of preparations in a matter of hours so that we may explore the foundation of the facility, and then you abandon the effort at the last minute?"

"Witness what I have discovered," 'Uqsotee replied, gesturing towards the hologram, "does this not look like Halo to you?"

"Indeed, it does," 'Putnamee replied, "which makes it as one with the dozens of other such displays that have been found throughout the facility."

'Uqsotee wasn't listening. He was looking intently at the scrolling geometric symbols on the terminal beneath the ring. "Very well," he said, "go ahead of me and I shall rejoin you when my work here is finished."

'Putnamee huffed. "Do not expect to take credit for any discoveries we make in your absence," he said. He stepped into the gravlift again, sinking towards the assembly of other elites and grunts at the bottom level.

"Do not expect to receive it, either," the scientist sighed. Exli 'Uqsotee tapped the holographic controls beneath the display, and it changed to show an oblate shape with many tendrils beneath it. He first mistook it for a star with a solar prominence emitting from it, but as he read the text beneath the display, his eyes grew wide.

# # # # # # #

In the dim light, Cortez saw another one of the bony tarantulas vigorously tearing at another lying dead on the ground in the tunnel. So they were scavengers, then. A slight relief, but they still scared the hell out of her. Murdock aimed his light directly at the carcass of the spider-crab and the smaller one instinctively skittered away, abandoning its meal. Murdock and Cortez walked over to the dead creature, much smaller than some of the ones they had seen so briefly but still bigger than a basketball. Several of its legs had fallen off or been torn off, but it was still discernible.

It was a cluster of hollow legs, each three inches in diameter with two joints. The body itself looked like a dirty brown rock with lifeless black pebbles for eyes. Murdock was intrigued by the eyes. If they were truly eyes, they had to be almost vestigial in the absolute darkness of the tunnels. It would explain why they reacted so violently to light-they were unaccustomed to it. It blinded them. The fact that they had eyes at all meant that at some point in Coral's history these... _creatures..._ had inhabited the surface and actually needed them. Before human terraforming had destroyed their native habitat. Before mankind had driven them underground. The arachnids obviously hadn't built the greater tunnel system. They had merely occupied it, untold ages after its builders abandoned it.

But who, then, had built them?

Cortez scrutinized the dead arthropod. The smaller one had done some damage, tearing away sections of its exoskeleton to get to the tough meat inside. There was no blood. It looked as if it had very little water in its system at all. The mouth was on the bottom of the body, and as far as she could tell, the creature didn't really have a front or a back. Unlike almost all terrestrial animal life, the creature wasn't symmetrical. Cortez knelt down, grabbed one of its conical legs, and pulled. It slid off effortlessly, leaving a thick tendon hanging out of the knee joint, but the leg itself was completely hollow. Cortez peeked inside the hollow tube.

Something shot out of it, right past her face. Cortez let out a sharp gasp of shock, not quite a scream, as the young spider-crab fell to the ground and skittered across the rock. They carried their young _inside their legs_? Murdock fiercely brought his heel down on the spiderling and ground it into the rock floor with a sickening crunch. Cortez dropped the leg in horror. "What the hell? What the _hell_ are those things?"

"I'd guess that their legs are meant to come off if they are attacked, like a gecko losing its tail," Murdock said, emotionlessly scraping the remains of the spider off of his boot. "They must carry their young in the hollow shells so that when the spiderling comes to maturity they just leave the leg behind with the spiderling in it. The discarded leg provides shelter for the spider until it gets big enough to claim or make a burrow of its own." He swiped his boot in the dirt, and the last chunks came off.

"That would explain the husks everywhere," Cortez said, calming down. "What killed this one?"

Murdock flipped over a piece of the larger animal's exoskeleton that the smaller one had torn away. Under the flashlight, it was obvious.

"Plasma burn. Looks like the major got a little spooked by it. We're getting close."

Joshua Murdock pulled his M6 open to make sure there was a chambered round. Cortez could tell exactly what was on his mind.

He didn't want to talk to the major when they found him. Even though the elite had not directly contributed to the destruction of Coral, the lieutenant wanted him dead. He was in it for revenge, and if he died in the process, Cortez knew that he wouldn't care. The man had been transformed into an emotionless killer, utterly unfazed by ending the life of a harmless-yet disgusting-animal. And as she saw it, his leading the operation could endanger them both. It was time to take charge.

"Listen," Cortez said, "I know you have a score to settle. We both have scores to settle. But let's not go off half-cocked. That elite wanted Esko alive, and if was willing to spare one human, it's possible that he can still be reasoned with. We don't shoot until we know that there's no winning."

"Don't start," Murdock said coldly. "Don't."

"He didn't kill her, Joshua."

The lieutenant stopped and slowly turned around. Cortez could see that he was squeezing the handle of the M6 tightly.

"My niece," he said, "was only two years old. _Two years old_. I am going to kill that thing. And if you are going to get in my way, go back now. I hadn't wanted you to come along in the first place."

"Yeah? And why is that?"

"You still have a home!" he shouted. "There are still people who need you and care and worry for you, and I can't let what happened to me happen to them! I've lost everyone I have! I don't want to lose you, too! I don't want you to _die!_"

They stood facing each other for several seconds in the darkness, speechless. The battery in Murdock's flashlight abruptly died. He began fishing through his pockets, looking for a replacement battery.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have said anything. I've... I haven't really..."

His pockets came up empty. Sighing in disgust, he looked up to see Cortez holding up a replacement battery.

"Take it," she said.

"I'm sor-"

"No, don't be," she said. "Take it."

Accepting the battery, he placed it in his flashlight and clicked the switch, but the light stayed off. Pointing it up, he smacked it several times before it finally switched on again. A beam of light shot up to the ceiling, and the ONI lieutenant looked at it incredulously. Cortez looked, as well.

The entire ceiling of the chamber was made of titanium. They were directly under the communications center, and upon inspection of the walls, they saw various motors and cables behind protective barriers, along with a titanium structure the size of an external garage. Joshua walked over to the small building cautiously, peering through a bulletproof glass window.

Murdock's eyes widened in horror.

"Dead man's switch," he said, "the bastard put one of those _things_ on a dead man's switch?"

"What? What is it?"

"Ackerson... the son of a bitch, he put one of those things _armed_ on a planet with nearly two billion civilians! It's a NOVA! It's an honest-to-God thermonuclear NOVA! What in God's name is it doing here?"

"On a dead man's switch?" Cortez said. Her mouth dropped open and she ran to the window to see for herself. There it was, plain as day. Untold gigatonage, capable of crushing a planet to dust in seconds, was only being restrained by a precarious timer. Before the glassing of Coral, a sizable fraction of the human race had been at the mercy of this slumbering cargo of death. If at any time the operator had fallen asleep at the switch, it would have detonated, killing everyone on the planet before the Covenant could have done it.

Why?

Murdock slammed his fist against the glass in frustration. Just when he thought he was figuring the place out, life had thrown another rock at him. He would have some serious questions for Miyagi and Jones if he made it back.

They heard a man's voice echoing through the tunnels. Cortez raised her shotgun, clipping her flashlight underneath the barrel. Murdock held his handgun at arm's length, brandishing his metal flashlight as if it were a club.

"Let's go!" Cortez whispered.

As they left the chamber, the communications center lowered until titanium met stone. Michael Jones, oblivious to the goings-on in the tunnels, frantically entered the four-digit code at the switch. His chronometer climbed back up another fifteen minutes. Breathing a sigh of relief, he exited the sterile code room and reentered the air-conditioned communications center. He glanced at the hole through the ceiling where plasma grenades had blown a hole through the floor of the main lab a few hours before. He would never have guessed by looking at the paper-littered floor that the remains of a partially-eaten arachnid the size of a basketball were now stuck to the underside of the titanium plate.

# # # # # # #

The crudely-hewn hexagonal tunnel was interrupted by a hole in the floor, inestimably deep. Cortez stared incredulously into the depths of the tunnel, graced by hanging moss as far as the eye could see. The elite's footprints terminated at the edge of the hole, reappearing on the other side.

"Do you get the feeling that we're in a giant ant colony?" she said.

"They got across it. There's a way for us to follow."

"That elite probably _jumped _across. After throwing Esko, anyway," Cortez said. "It's at least ten feet across. We can't clear it. We'll have to find a way around."

"If we try that, we'll get lost down here."

"No," she said softly, "we were always lost."

They looked down the hole in silence as wind whistled by somewhere below.

_How does one rate the value of a human life_, Murdock thought. Two people were risking their lives for the benefit of one. They could easily die trying, but they tried anyway. Was it worth the price of two lives to save one? He looked at the private, silhouetted against the darkness. He knew now that he would willingly risk his life to save hers, but when they first met, he did so grudgingly, as if it were a chore. It had been an obligation at first, but he had since come to value her as a person. Esko, however, he did not know.

But what difference was that supposed to make? His being more of a stranger did not make him less of a person, and just like Cortez, there were people that were hoping and praying that he would come home safely.

Murdock took three steps back from the edge of the precipice, taking in a deep breath. He then sprang forward, jumping as far as he could. He gracelessly slammed into the rim of the hole on the other side, sending him falling forward. He slid several inches in the dirt, cutting a gash in his forehead, but he had cleared the hole. His heart pounding, he coughed and pushing himself to his feet, dusting the dirt off of his uniform. A shotgun landed on the ground next to him, sliding to a stop on the loose dirt, and he turned just in time to see Cortez attempting the same jump.

"No," he said, "don't!"

Cortez jumped, curling her legs beneath her as she flew across the gap, but she was weighed down by the extra gear her H-harness allowed her to carry. She landed on her feet, but her heels were hanging off the edge, and the marine promptly began to fall backwards. She pinwheeled her arms trying to retain her balance, but she was clearly going to fall. Murdock grabbed one of her hands as loose dirt gave way underfoot and she slipped over the edge with a sharp gasp.

Murdock dove to the ground as she fell. She caught the ledge with her chin and one arm, rock cutting her face. Loose rocks in the hole were broken off, send clattering down the shaft, but still they held onto each others' hands. Murdock found little purchase in the loose dirt, and pulling her up sent him slipping closer to the edge himself. Murdock's flashlight was nudged off the edge by his elbow, and the feeble light winked in and out as it fell down the shaft, hitting bottom and breaking over ten seconds later. Pulling against each other, she managed to get back up on the ledge. They only let go of each others' hands when they both had their backs on solid ground again. Gasping in the darkness, they lay still for several seconds. Cortez reached for her flashlight, but Murdock grabbed her hand.

She looked at him in surprise, but he was pointing further up the tunnel. There was light.

Cortez kept her flashlight off, grabbing the shotgun and pushing herself to her feet. They crept through the tunnel as it sloped upwards, seeing that there was another chamber up ahead.

It was nothing like the others.

Murdock leaned around the corner, his M6 at ready, but the elite wasn't there. A layer of dirt covered a metal floor, and for the first time artificial lighting and a myriad of machinery could be seen. They had entered what appeared to be a manufacturing facility, but equipment and controls were placed along the walls and even on the ceiling twenty feet overhead. There were no computer terminals, no holographic displays. The machinery was undeniably alien, yet... crude. There was nothing delicate or artistic about the equipment, which seemed to have been built for durability. It had been built to outlast time.

One piece of equipment in particular caught Murdock's attention. A number of semitransparent chemical storage tanks lined the far wall, all connected to an empty central tank with a single lever-like control on it. He cautiously walked over to the tanks. Each of them carried some sort of thick, pulpy liquid. He placed his hand on the switch.

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Cortez said.

"This machine isn't Covenant," Murdock said, "and it wasn't the people who made the crystal. I've got to know. I need to know why this is happening."

He hit the switch. Machinery across the room rumbled to life and the lights went on full, revealing a series of metal and glass containers being moved by a conveyor behind the tank. The chemicles began churning in the tanks, and the central basin was filled with a precise mixture of the liquids. He placed his hand on the glass. The fluid was warm. It was... _alive_. Primordial soup in a can. As he watched, bolts of energy leapt across the fluid in the tank, shaping it, congealing it, creating order out of chaos. For thirty seconds, the fluid was swept up into a single mass in the recesses of the tank, until the horrible result was unveiled.

It was a mass of brown tentacles propelling a bile-colored sack of fluid, ravenously throwing itself against the dirty glass. It was a virulent, abhorrent form of life which sought only to consume and destroy. It was a weapon.

A pump activated, and the creature was sucked out of the tank through the machinery. It came to a rest inside of one of the glass and metal containers on the conveyor belt as the protein fluids refilled the central tank and another of the creatures was cloned. Looking across the vast chamber, Murdock saw a dozen other such machines fulfilling the same purpose.

"Help!"

They both turned around to see Keom 'Yerumee standing among the banks of machinery, holding Esko as a human shield. Murdock and Cortez trained their weapons on the elite, but it crouched down behind the scientist, its fingers digging into the man's side.

"Be silent, human!" the elite rasped, holding his plasma rifle next to the man's ear.

"Drop your weapon!" Cortez shouted.

Murdock trained his M6C on Esko's chest. _Just show me your face, you son-of-a-bitch_, he thought.

"Look around you," 'Yerumee said, "I ask you this: who is the greater fool, they who make a mistake, or they who repeat it? The lies of the Prophets grow clear. Your people are no enemies to the Forerunners, no affront to the gods... yet you are just as dangerous."

Cortez and Murdock began circling the elite in opposite directions, trying to flank him, but he backed away from them and pressed his plasma rifle against the back of his hostage's neck, searing the man's flesh. The scientist let out a yelp of pain, but the elite reached into a large pocket on his lab coat and retrieved the green crystal, pulsing with unfathomable power. Crystal in hand, the elite wrapped an arm around the man's midsection instead.

"Let him go," Cortez shouted, "or we'll open fire!"

"By no deed of mine, none of you shall escape this world alive," 'Yerumee retorted. "I pity you. You know not what you have done. You know not what devil you have awoken. I have seen such tunnels before as those you just emerged from. Impossible, yes, but true. A hive, it is! Undisturbed for untold millenia, but a hive nonetheless! I now know the truth, that these tunnels were once home to the _true_ foes of the Forerunners; the creators of that which would destroy us all! Alas, all the while the Forerunners' greatest enemy has resided within our own Covenant!"

The elite was rattling on like a madman, but seemed completely calm and rational. Cortez swallowed before speaking.

"Put the crystal down and back away from it!"

"I fear that I cannot, human. It is not safe in your hands. I know the secret. Your people are not an affront to the gods, but you would again unleash the horror that once swept the galaxy. Your people have fought the parasite at Halo, but you have apparently failed to understand that it has a will of its own, and it knows no ally. Despite this, you still intended to try to use it as a weapon?"

"What parasite?" Murdock spat. "Who built this place? Who are the Forerunners? _What in the hell are you talking about?_"

"Your foolishness knows no bounds, human," 'Yerumee said, remembering how the human had interrogated him, how he had threatened the crystal. "The parasite is the very creature that this engine is producing. Your people met it in battle on the Holy Ring before one of your demons brutally destroyed it."

'Yerumee laughed inwardly. He was barely able to control himself. What he had learned had shaken him to the core. The Prophets had lied about everything... including their promise promise of the Great Journey. How many had died for its sake? And why? The elite's face contorted with fury as the image of Ilion 'Hoksatee's headless body resurfaced in his memory. Seeing the new flame of anger in the elite's eyes, Murdock and Cortez tensed. 'Yerumee tightened his grip on his plasma rifle.

"No! Wait!" Esko babbled, terrified.

"The Prophets must pay for what they have done," the major said, tightly gripping the crystal. "Their manipulation is complete. It shall not be enough to present the Holy Light to the council. The Covenant shall break. The Covenant _must_ break. My people must be unleashed from their ignorance. The truth must not be silenced... and you mustn't stand in my way."

"You don't know what that crystal is," Cortez said, "what it's capable of. Put it down, now!"

"You shall not have it!" 'Yerumee shouted, "I do only what I must to protect my people, and this crystal is their ransom!"

He tossed Esko aside, sending the man slamming into one of the containers on the conveyor belt. Seeing his chance, Murdock fired a single shot. The bullet entered through the roof of the elite's mouth and exited through the back of his head, spraying dark purple blood across a bank of machinery behind him.

Keom 'Yerumee went limp, falling to his knees and then crashing backwards to the floor. Dead.

Cortez pulled Esko to his feet, checking the man for injuries. Somehow, he had managed not to slice open an artery when he broke the glass container. The man brushed himself off. He was bleeding from several places, including a glancing blow to the forehead which bled profusely, and his left ear and the back of his neck sported second-degree burns.

"Are you alright?" Cortez asked.

"I believe I am, yes," Esko said. "Thank you."

The scientist looked at Murdock, who was walking over to the elite as smoke rolled lazily out of the barrel of his gun.

"He showed me things," Esko said, "and he told me things. Frightening things. I did not know what to make of half of it. He said..."

The scientist leaned forward, overcome by a sudden wave of nausea. He coughed a few times, but did not throw up. "He said... that these creatures... these _parasites_ had been encountered in combat by the Covenant before. He said that it turns men into monsters."

Cortez thought briefly of the mutilated skeletons they had discovered in the cave, glancing at the machinery. How could those fragile bubble-like creatures have done _that?_

"He said the Covenant was defeated by them on Halo. He did not say what Halo was, but he did say that it had been destroyed by a Spartan, halting their spread. Halo seems to have some sort of... religious significance. There was a race called the Forerunners, they built Halo. The Covenant worships them. It's the basis of their religion. But the Forerunners were at war with the race that built these tunnels, hundreds of thousands of years ago. They... these tunnel-builders, he didn't elaborate... they had tried to invade the galaxy, but they were steadily losing the war... so they made the parasite..."

Cortez had stopped listening. Esko was studying his feet, not looking her in the eye. "Where were you leading him?" she asked.

Esko looked up briefly. "Due west, towards the Orion dig site," he said. He was not oblivious to the suspicious look on the marine's face. "I do not know these tunnels! I thought he was going to kill me! The elite said that his unit had landed there. He said that they were looking for the vault we uncovered, but they were captured. He also said that the dig site was the only part of Coral that the Covenant would not have glassed. If these tunnels are connected to the vaults that we had uncovered, the Covenant may be in these tunnels already. We must get moving!"

Murdock stood over the dead elite as its dead eyes stared back up at him. The intellect that those eyes had once concealed was now gone, snuffed out like a candle. A small purple stream leaked down the elite's forehead to join the growing pool that seeped from the exit wound on the back of his head. The blood was being absorbed by the thick layer of dirt that covered the floor, and the elite's mouth hung open in a look of shock and disbelief.

The realization struck him like a bolt of lightning: the elite hadn't been raising its weapon; it had been turning to run. It had had no intention to attack them, but he had killed it anyway.

Only then did he truly understand what the elite had been talking about. He didn't want to kill humans anymore. He had just wanted to protect his own people. 'Yerumee hadn't wanted to rejoin the Covenant, he wanted to tear it down. If the Covenant tore itself in civil war, it could have meant the salvation of the human race.

But Murdock had killed him. Out of hatred and misguided vengeance, he had killed him without hesitation.

"What have I done?" Murdock whispered.

Esko leaned down and pried the crystal out of the elite's hand, also taking the dropped plasma rifle. "We've got to go," he said, "now!"

"Come on," Cortez shouted. Murdock slowly backed away from the dead elite, then turned and followed the others in a dead run.

A small creature that had hidden in the corner sensed that it was, once again, alone. It would have to be quick. Bigger scavengers would arrive soon to chase it away. The lone arachnid cautiously slunk out of its burrow in the wall, approached Keom 'Yerumee's body... and began to feed.

The machinery in the room continued to operate, churning out their deadly product and storing them in jars of metal and glass.

And halfway down the line, a broken container slowly slid along the conveyor belt.

# # # # # # #

**INCOMING TRANSMISSION**

RECEIVED BY: CORAL SLIPSPACE DETECTION GRID SIGNAL INTERCEPT (TACSAT #42)  
SOURCE: LT. CMDR. MIRANDA KEYES, UNSC SOBERG, ONI SIGNAL CORPS  
DECRYPT KEY: # # # # # # # # OK # # # # # # # # OK # # # # # # # # OK # # # # # # # # SIGNATURE VERIFIED  
CONFIRMED SOURCE: LT. CMDR. MIRANDA KEYES, UNSC SOBERG, ONI SIGNAL CORPS  
ENCRYPT KEY: # # # # # # # #

#BEGIN STREAM#

RESPONDING TO DISTRESS SIGNAL IN SLIPSTREAM ORIGIN TACSAT NETWORK PLANET CORAL AWAITING CONFIRMATION OF HUMAN SURVIVORS HOLDING ORBIT AROUND VISTA AT LAGRANGE POINT L3 UNABLE TO APPROACH CORAL AT PRESENT TIME COVENANT ARMADA DETECTED IN ORBIT OF CORAL CONTAINS 10 TEN CCS-CLASS BATTLE CRUISERS HOLDING POSITION IN GEOSYNCRONOUS ORBIT LATITUDE 24 TWENTY-FOUR DEGREES NORTH MUST DEVISE PLAN OF ACTION AWAITING CONFIRMATION OF HUMAN SURVIVORS PLEASE RESPOND

#STREAM REPEATS#

REPLY?

# # # # # # #

Lieutenant Commander Miranda Keyes looked from the computer console before her to the view outside the bridge. The bridge on the aging vessel was smaller than that of a Longsword fighter, and three people could barely fit inside. Green and gray bands of cloud rolled by underneath as the UNSC _Soberg_ orbited the gas giant Vista. They had taken refuge from the Covenant forces on the other side of the massive world, and as far as they could tell, they had entered the system without being detected. Corporal Morelli had managed to link up with the TACSAT network in orbit of Coral, and the satellites had returned haunting images of the surface of the tortured world.

She looked up from the cloud tops to see the breathtaking night sky that Coral was famous for. A soft orange star glowed at the heart of a cloud of dust and rock that stretched out of sight in both directions. Since hearing of her father's death, she had been at a loss for words. She hoped that there were survivors on Coral, but at the same time another part of her hoped their weren't. It was selfish, but she knew that her father would be appalled by what was happening. He had sent her to the signal corps to keep her out of trouble, but here she was, pitting her aging and utterly unarmed vessel against an entire Covenant fleet. If she attempted a rescue, the Covenant would surely pursue the ship, and their options were limited. They could try throwing the pursuing fleet off by releasing slipspace probes in multiple directions, but it was possible they would be prepared for such a tactic. Even if a rescue could be staged, the prospects for survival were grim.

But she had come anyway. She and her crew were risking their lives for complete strangers. Her father had to understand _that_. But did her crew?

She thought of Corporal Morelli. The man had a wife and son at home. Why would he volunteer for this?

It was not the rational thing to do. But it was the human thing to do.

They would wait.

# # # # # # #

Murdock ran up to the titanium door, seething in fury. It had been closed from the other side. They had locked them out. He slammed his fist against the metal repeatedly, shouting at the top of his lungs.

"Miyagi! Jones! Open this door!"

Cortez and Esko brought up the rear. Cortez shook her head and ripped the plasma rifle out of Esko's hands, pushing past him and walking towards the door.

"Get out of the way, Joshua," she said, "I'm going to burn through it."

"Even if you had a fully-charged battery in that thing," Murdock said, "you wouldn't get halfway through. We're stuck here."

"We're dead," Esko whimpered.

"All right, then," Cortez said, "we'll try it this way. They've got to hit the dead man's switch again sometime. We go back to the code room, burn our way inside, and when the communications center comes down to dock with it, we'll-"

There was a jarring metallic ring that echoed down the tunnels. They all turned their attention back to the door as its motors strained to pull it open. Finally, the titanium plate rose to the ceiling to reveal Michael Jones standing there with an M6C pistol. Yuji Miyagi sat in a chair, rubbing a telltale bruise on his forehead.

"Welcome back," Jones said, grinning broadly. "Sorry about the door. I had to run and hit the switch and Mr. Director here tried to lock you out. I found the code to the door, though."

Cortez raised an eyebrow. "Really? How?"

"I figured that we'll need Quincy if we're going to get off this planet alive, so I let him go. Screw Ackerson, and screw Section Three. They knew damn well that we were alive, and they were willing to let us die down here to keep their work secret."

He turned to Murdock. "I say you should do your thing. Take that bastard _down_." He gestured towards the aquarium by the door. "We've got all the evidence we need right here. We put this thing on ice and bring it in, and Section Zero won't be able to resist canning that motherf-"

Murdock gently pushed past Jones and wordlessly walked over to the cloudy aquarium besides the door. The creature within took note of him again and threw itself against the glass in hunger and frustration. This time, Murdock did not flinch.

_I know what you are now_, he thought. He inspected the set of controls beneath the aquarium. Finding the button he was looking for, he took one final look at the creature within. It threw itself against the bulletproof glass one last time, singlemindedly focused on its goal. The purpose it had been made for. To destroy.

He pushed the button.

The inside of the aquarium was consumed in flame, and the creature popped instantly. The severed tentacles flopped rapidly as the purging fire consumed them, and after several seconds they were finally still. The burners continued to spew fire until all that was left of the creature was a thin layer of black soot and a few whisps of gray smoke in the tank.

Jones' grin dropped. "So... what did I miss?"


	8. Run

**Chapter Seven: Run**

"Still no response from the surface?" Keyes asked.

"Not yet," Corporal Morelli replied. "I've been keeping track through a reverse feed on the TACSAT network, and the Covenant is still just hovering there. I managed to get a high-res image of the surface, though... you should take a look at this."

Morelli handed a datapad to Keyes. On it was a picture of Coral as viewed from orbit.

"Zoom in on the section marked in red," Morelli pointed. "I figured that it was the point on the surface directly below the formation of Covenant ships. Remember what they said about Reach? That the Covenant had left some stuff? Well, the sky cleared up a bit over that area. Take a look."

Keyes zoomed in on the image and the datapad cleared it up. A small green-yellow patch in a sea of molten rock and glass. Zooming in once more, the image cleaned itself again. Keyes' mouth fell open.

The Covenant was digging. Where there had once been an eighty-by-ten meter trench, there was now a gaping hole in which there appeared to be an alien structure buried. Individual elites and grunts were too small to see, but Keyes could make out a bug-like vehicle. A Covenant scarab. Hovering over the dig site was the distinct manta shape of a Covenant cruiser.

"That will be a problem," Keyes said.

"That's not the only thing I found, though," Morelli said. "I looked into the jump records for the TACSATs around Coral. I'm telling you I've never seen anything like it before in my life: it goes against everything we know about slipspace."

"What is it?"

"No deviation, no random exit points. The probes jump into the slipstream, and they come back out in the exact same place they went in. They're working exactly the way they are supposed to. Normally, eddies in the slipstream cause the probes to emerge thousands of miles from where they went in. Sometimes they never come back - normally that means that they jumped inside a planet and rematerialized inside solid rock hundreds of miles underground, but sometimes they really just vanish. But here, it's like there are no eddies. No current. I don't know what happened that caused this, but we'll have to take advantage of it while we can."

"When did this happen?"

"That's the strange part. Two days before Coral was glassed, the probes were still jumping through eddies... the day that a strong pulse was sent through the slipstream from something on Coral. After that, nothing."

"A giant pulse of energy, and then the eddies were gone... I wonder what happened?"

# # # # # # #

A group of elites and grunts came to a stop at the bottom of the gravlift and fanned out around the room. They were at the very foundation of the buried Forerunner structure, and were busily setting up their equipment in the dark room. Holographic consoles were spread around at random, and a number of strange, cone-like tubes were scattered on the floor. Yugyaw thought this was odd, since the floors in the rest of the facility were immaculately clean. The orange-armored grunt picked one of these up and sniffed it cautiously, tossing it aside when the Fieldmaster cast him a dirty look.

With no dirt to stake torches into, grunts began to set up bracing tripods around the room and stand plasma torches in them, bathing the room in an eerie green glow. Fieldmaster Noga 'Putnamee shot a final resentful look up the gravlift shaft. If 'Uqsotee did not choose to come down, so be it. The Fieldmaster would lay claim anything the expedition found.

'Putnamee had never liked the scientist. Exli 'Uqsotee's research program bordered on heresy. _Expand_ Forerunner technology? How could he dare to think that he could improve that which was already perfect? The fieldmaster was surprised that the Forerunners had not smitten the scientist through some accident, but then, perhaps it was not through supernatural means that the will of the Forerunners was meant to be carried out. 'Putnamee knew that the Council of Deed and Doctrine saw use in the fool, but for the life of him he could not understand why. The scientist had an abrasive personality, and a damnable desire to stop for every minor discovery.

'Putnamee knew the true purpose of the dig, of course. The Jiralhanae and the Sangheili were actively looking for something to tip the favor of the prophets. So far, nothing of potential value to the Hierarchs had been discovered, and the facility's purpose remained a mystery. But rather than forge on through the facility, that foolish scientist had decided to comb through every detail. Was it not obvious that time was short? Was it not obvious that anything of value would have a place of prominence, rather than being lost in the details? 'Putnamee's stubborn inability to see another's point of view had gotten him into trouble in the past, and he knew it. But given the circumstances, he could not even begin to understand why the scientist would drag his feet. The humans had all perished when the world was burned. So certain of this fact were the elites at 'Putnamee's command that most of them did not even burden themselves with weapons on this expedition. What danger was there here? What cause for delay?

Of course, the Fieldmaster was supposed to wait for 'Uqsotee to join the expedition. But for how long? After a few long minutes, the fieldmaster's impatience got the better of him. 'Putnamee took a final look up the gravlift and huffed. "Very well," he said, "we proceed without him."

"Master, look!" a grunt squeaked. It pointed at a gaping hole at the end of a hallway. 'Putnamee squinted, seeing that it was clearly not supposed to be there. Intrigued, the Fieldmaster plucked a plasma torch out of a stand and walked to the end of the hall. A moment later, he waved for the others to follow.

As Yugyaw came close to the hole, he nearly tripped over a piece of debris on the floor. He picked it up, glancing uneasily at the pattern inscribed in it to see that it had once been part of the wall. The hole in the wall had been cut from the outside. Shuddering, the grunt unconsciously checked his methane gauge. It was full. Yugyaw cursed in his native tongue. He had hoped it would be close to empty. He hoped he could have been excused to return to the surface and fill his tank.

He would have given anything not to go into the tunnels.

# # # # # # #

"I meant what I said," Miyagi insisted, "I had no idea that machinery was down there. I don't even know what Ackerson wanted with that organism, anyway. I simply felt that it was in our best interests if the door were to be locked down in case the elite-"

"Bullshit," Murdock growled. "You were willing to lock us out and let all three of us starve to death in those tunnels, just so you could keep your project under wraps."

The director was unnaturally calm, but his eyes were fixated on the barrel of the M90 shotgun that hovered in his face.

"I ought to just kill you right now," Cortez said.

Jones was fidgeting in the corner. "Could we please calm down, people?"

"You're not a murderer," Miyagi grinned. "Killing me would weight on your conscience for the rest of your life, and you aren't ready for that."

"Don't be so sure," Cortez rasped.

Jones glanced at the computer screen next to him. There was a flashing green light there. "Uh... people? A word?"

# # # # # # #

"Spread through the tunnels!" Fieldmaster 'Putnamee barked. "Time is short, and the glorious treasures of our lords await us!"

Elites began to fan out through the various passageways that lay outside the gaping hole in the wall as the Fieldmaster continued to bellow orders to elites and grunts alike. Yugyaw looked around the chamber, carved by water over thousands of years along the exterior of the Forerunner structure. They were standing outside of the facility nearly a kilometer underground. Looking up, Yugyaw could see only a dark gap between the outer wall of the facility and the rock that encompassed it, stretching beyond sight. What was waiting in the shadows to drop down upon an unsuspecting Unggoy?

_Stop scaring yourself_, the grunt thought. _This place bad enough already_.

Yugyaw noticed then that five elites had remained in the chamber and, unlike half of the elites that had joined the expedition, these were armed. With swords. The Fieldmaster was talking to them. Curious, the grunt padded his way across the chamber towards them.

"The Prophet of Regret insists that he be permitted to sit among the Council, even in closed session?" an elite asked incredulously.

"Absurd! He is not worthy to set foot in the temple, let alone on the council floor!"

"It is true," 'Putnamee said quietly, "he does so at Regret's bidding, and Regret is an outspoken supporter of the Jiralhanae. The Hierarch has gone so far as to propose the changing of the Guard, after what happened on Halo. Suffice to say, the scientist's loyalty to the Covenant was already questionable, his faith to the Forerunners in doubt. But this is not a matter of his piety. This is a matter of his loyalty to the Sangheili race. He drags his feet, combing through details and delaying expeditions such as this when he is well aware that every moment counts. He asks the prophets of the Council of Deed and Doctrine to enforce his autonomy in this operation, but he does nothing with it but hold the rest of us back. We should have explored these tunnels days ago."

The elites nodded.

"He shall not be missed," one muttered.

"What are we to do with him afterwards?" another asked. "The prophets will be displeased that their stooge has met this... accident."

"Not so much as you might think," 'Putnamee said. "If that traitorous heretic arrives, you know what to do. Find a hole. They will not ask questions."

Something moved against Yugyaw's foot. He looked down to see a creature almost one third of his height with many legs crouched next to him. The grunt squealed in terror and jumped back. The arachnid vanished into a shadow instantly, but the Fieldmaster took quickly notice of the eavesdropping grunt.

"Away with you!" 'Putnamee shouted, raising his gun menacingly. Yugyaw ran as fast as his legs could carry him to the nearest passageway, terrified at what he had seen and heard. The Fieldmaster was mad enough to kill him if he came back, and there was nothing that he could do about it... unless, maybe, if he found an artifact.

Using the feeble light of his plasma pistol to see, the grunt waddled down the pathway into darkness.

# # # # # # #

"Jones, wait up!"

"What is it?"

"We just received a transmission," Jones called, "it's UNSC!"

The man ran down the corridor, practically slamming into the closed door of the communications center. He frantically typed the code into the door and pushed around it as it opened. Shoving the swivel chair out of the way, Jones set his M6C down on a table and stood in front of the terminal, typing rapidly. The others squeezed in one at a time, with Cortez still holding Miyagi at gunpoint. They crowded around Jones, staring over his shoulders and desparately trying to read.

"How many ships?" Cortez asked.

Jones bit his lip. "Just one."

Cortez' face lit up with hope. "Is it a fighting ship?"

"Uh... no. It's the... UNSC _Soberg_. They're with the ONI Signal Corps. Radio beacon deployment program."

Cortez muttered something under her breath in spanish. "That means they're unarmed. Against a whole damn Covie fleet."

"Still," Esko said, "they're probably our only chance to get out of here before the Covenant finds us."

"That's why they said they're here," Jones reported.

"How do they intend to try to shake an entire Covenant fleet?" Miyagi asked.

Jones typed for a moment. The question was relayed through the slipspace probe network and answered after several long seconds.

"They're gonna try to launch a bunch of slipspace probes at the same time as decoys. Throw the covies off course."

"Not in a million years," Cortez said.

"Ten CCS battle cruisers holding position in geosynchronous orbit..." Esko read aloud. "According to this, the Covenant are all bunched up in one place. Say we meet them on the other side of Coral?"

Jones thought for a moment. "We have no way to get to the other side of Coral, but if they were to jump in and back out quickly, launching decoys in a dozen different directions, we might be able to divide the Covenant fleet. We jump somewhere into this system's asteroid belt, and we've got a chance of losing them in the rocks."

"Provided we don't fly straight into one," Esko said, "that belt is more than twenty times denser than the one in Earth's solar system. It would be like trying to fly through a rainstorm without getting wet."

"Fine, then we do a Cole jump out of the system entirely," Jones said.

Miyagi slid the M6C off of the table, hiding it under his lab coat.

"Explain this to me," Cortez said, "how are we gonna to hook up with them? They can't land on Coral's surface. That old prowler isn't even built to enter an atmosphere."

"The Apparition," Murdock replied. "I saw a recording of the capture. The covies we took prisoner landed here in an Apparition dropship. They've hidden it with branches, and they never told their leaders they were coming here."

"Yeah! That's only two kilometers from the Orion dig site," Cortez said.

"And our satellites say that the dig site is the only place the Covenant spared," Esko said. "Ten square miles."

"Then that dropship should still be hidden there," Jones said, grinning broadly.

"ONI salvaged several of them after the battle for Sigma Octanus," Esko said. "Apparitions. They more or less figured out the controls. I remember reading the report; they're fairly simple."

"Hey, I remember that, too," Cortez said. "An ONI guy told us about it back when I was guarding the Orion site."

"I read it too," Murdock said. "I... saw it on the bulletin board."

"Looks like we're at no loss for pilots," Miyagi said.

"Shit," Jones snorted, "probably the reason the Covies're discontinuing them."

"So the plan is to take a Covenant dropship from a Covenant-held dig site, fly it through a Covenant fleet, dock with a human ship, launch a couple of decoys and run like hell," Cortez said. "I'm game if they're game. So how do we get to the dropship? From here, we're still ten miles away."

"Damn," Jones said, remembering. "The switch. I suppose if I hit it now, that gives us nearly six hours before it hits zero... going two miles an hour on foot across the surface, we could make it by walking."

Murdock slowly shook his head with a sick look on his face. "No," he said, "no. No."

Cortez of course understood the lieutenant's objection, personal though it was, but as she thought a more pressing problem came to mind. "He's right," she said. "We can't cross the surface. We only have three suits of ODST armor, and there's five of us."

Jones bit his lip. "Then do you think we could go through the tunnels to get there?"

"Please not again," Esko muttered.

"We could try, I suppose," Cortez said. "There's some messed-up shit down there, but given the circumstances, that's probably our best option."

"Then we have a plan," Miyagi said. He drew the magnum, pressed it against the back of Jones' leg, and pulled the trigger.

The gunshot sounded like a muffled splatter, but Jones immediately wailed in pain, clutching his leg. Miyagi turned and ran out of the communications center as Jones collapsed to the floor. Cortez raised her M6C and fired twice. The director ran with his head down as the bullets blew craters into the wall beyond him, and turned a corner just as Cortez began to give chase. She rounded the corner just in time to see the lockdown door finish closing. She glared through the discolored glassteel porthole in the door. The director briefly looked her in the eye from the other side, but then the man turned and ran without saying a word.

"Miyagi! Miyagi!" Cortez slammed her fist against the sealed door. "Fuck!"

Jones wailed in pain again, and Cortez headed back to the communications center. Skidding to a halt outside the door, her face curled in horror as she saw what the gunshot had done to him. A pool of dark blood was rapidly spreading across the deck, which was spattered with chunks of cartiladge that used to be the man's right kneecap. The leg itself was half-severed at the knee, practically blown off by the high-explosive round. Jones had already pissed himself, and continued to scream in unfathomable agony. He would never walk again, and given the damage to his femoral artery, he could easily bleed to death in minutes.

Murdock had torn the pant leg open and was applying pressure to the gaping hole in the man's leg, but blood continued to spurt between his fingers at regular intervals corresponding to heartbeat. It was definitely the femoral artery. Esko presently took off his belt and tied it around Jones' upper leg as tightly as he could. With the tourniquet in place, the bleeding lessened, but not by enough. Holstering her M6C, Cortez searched through the pockets of her fatigues and came up with a small white emergency field kit. She ran over and opened it, retrieving a sqeeze tube of Biofoam and a needle. She uncapped the bottle and screwed the needle on.

"Okay, we need to apply this directly to the femoral artery," she said. Blood was pooling in the wound, hiding the artery. "Murdock, suction."

Murdock grabbed the field medical kit, finding a handheld battery-operated pump with a rubber straw sticking out of one end and a rubber bladder from the other. He turned it on and the siphon quickly cleared the wound, filling the balloon-like sack with blood. Jones whimpered weakly, his bloodstained hands convulsing.

"Esko, the artery's gonna retract! Put some pressure on it!"

"I got it, I got it!"

"Grab hold of it!"

"Against the bone... come on, that's it!"

"He's getting shocky!"

"Hold it still!"

"Quick! It's tearing!"

Cortez stuck the needle directly into the open end of the artery and injected biofoam into it. Jones let out a weak moan and blacked out from the pain as the foam congealed in the wound, but the bleeding finally stopped. Cortez squeezed the rest of the bottle into the wound, filling it. The smell of blood completely overpowered the trademark polymer stink of Biofoam. With the foam sealing the wound, no blood would go to the lower half of his leg. Jones would lose the leg, but he would live. Breathing heavily, the three shook hands in congratulations.

"Jesus," Murdock said.

"Yeah," Cortez breathed.

Esko looked down the hallway again. "Where is Miyagi going?"

Murdock's eyes widened. "The tunnels!"

He jumped up and accessed the computer terminal, his fingers painting the keys red as he flew through the menus. He finally accessed the security cameras, finding with disgust that they had been deactivated by Quincy. He brought up a schematic of the facility, selecting the section of the base that the lockdown lab was in. As before, the lab was not included in the schematic. He entered his Section Zero override code at a number of prompts, still unable to get the computer to acknowledge the lab's existence or let him access security or camera controls there. After wrestling with the computer for upwards of a minute, he abandoned the attempt and was finally able to hack into the camera above the keypad of the lockdown door at the end of that corridor. It offered a low-resolution side view and Murdock couldn't see into the lockdown lab, but Miyagi was standing in the corridor, punching numbers into the door lock with the M6C hanging by his side. He had apparently forgotten part of the ten-digit code that opened the lockdown lab. Murdock punched the intercom button.

"Miyagi! Get away from that door!"

The man on the screen raised his gun in surprise, but upon realizing it was just the intercom, he lowered the gun and began typing keys again.

"Miyagi!"

The keypad next to the door flashed green, and a klaxon sounded on the screen. The door began to rise into the ceiling. Murdock watched on the screen as Miyagi stepped forward into the lockdown lab. Cortez came and looked over his shoulder at the screen as the director stepped out of the camera's view.

"That son of a bitch locked us in!" she spat. "He's leaving us here to die!"

"He'll never navigate those tunnels," Murdock said. "If we-"

A gunshot came over the computer's tinny speakers, then another, then another. Miyagi backed out of the lockdown lab, fired once more into the open door, and began running back down the hall, towards the camera. He ran into the door, frantically typing at the keypad beneath the camera. Beads of sweat were standing out on his face, and his eyes were those of a cornered animal. Hearing something squishing behind him, Cortez and Murdock watched as Miyagi turned around, his back blocking the camera. The director stepped out of the way, and Cortez curled her face as she saw a dozen of the creatures from the aquarium slithering across the floor. There was a final gunshot and one of the creatures popped, sending a bile-like fluid splattering across the floor, but two of the creatures made a flying leap at something off-camera, and Miyagi began to scream.

Murdock and Cortez couldn't see Miyagi on the screen. They didn't really _want_ to know what was happening to him. After a few seconds, they heard something snap and director stopped screaming, as if the wind had been knocked out of him. The creatures were running aimlessly in frenzied circles on the floor, waiting to catch sight of their next victim.

"Jesus, son of God."

The display on the monitor flashed brilliantly and went blank, bringing up the official seal of the Office of Naval Intelligence.

"I have feared a breach for some time, but I suppose it was inevitable," a voice said.

Murdock looked up from the animated logo towards the wall. "Quincy?"

"Quarantine has been compromised. Containment protocol must be enacted to halt this outbreak. Will you comply?"

Leaving Jones on the floor, Esko stood up and looked over Murdock's shoulder. "Quincy, what's going on? What by God were those... _things?_"

The monitor cleared, bringing up a rotating semitransparent image of the creature from the aquarium. "Agent in question: Chimera Macrovirus. Codename: the Flood. Detailed in project file 'Chimera Initiative.'"

"Open it," Murdock said.

"Access denied. Decrypting... Juliet Alpha system block removed. Access granted. Project: The Chimera Initiative. Purpose: the study and assessment of the tactical applications of the Chimera macrovirus. Summary is as follows: The Chimera macrovirus is documented as a virulent, parasitic form of life that differs from all others in the respect that it contains no genetic material of its own. Though it is produced artificially, upon initial contact with a suitable host its reproduction becomes self-sufficient to the point of causing ecological instability. Assimilates its host on a cellular level, utilizing the body's systems to spread itself throughout the entire organism; in the case of most organisms, by burrowing into the chest, destroying and replacing the core of the circulatory system, and utilizing the host's existing circulatory system to spread infection throughout the entire organism. It then digests parts of the host and reprocesses it into the desired form."

The image of the corridor reappeared on the monitor. This time, however, the tiny infection forms were all gone. A dark shape stood up in front of the camera, turning to look at the door. Esko ran forward, hitting the intercom button. "Miyagi! You're alive! How did you..."

The director's mouth hung open unnaturally wide, exhaling wordlessly. His skin was dark, and laced with veins that were more green than blue. As the former director turned to face the door, his face came into view. His eyes had all the vision of a corpse. The creature stared sightlessly at the door until the man's head rolled to a side and he raised an arm, slamming it against the door, then again, then again. On the fifth attempt, a loud snap was heard over the tinny speaker and Miyagi stopped hitting the door. Unsteadily stepping backwards with his broken left arm hanging limply at his side, he finally came fully into view.

Cortez and Murdock cringed in horror, but Esko simply watched in giddy fascination. A tentacled creature the size of a football was lodged in Miyagi's chest. The ribs were caved in, and his back appeared to have been snapped. Cortez thought again of the circle of mutilated bodies that she and Murdock had discovered in the tunnels.

The man howled with inhuman ferocity and charged the door again, and another crunch was heard.

"The Hall of the Mountain King was not built by ONI," Quincy said. "In the year 2481, a resurgence of the Friedan movement known as March 33 declared its independence from the UEG and relocated to Coral during the final stages of terraforming. Expecting UNSC suppression, March 33 located the tunnel complex that you investigated and established a permanent base underground. Building out of the existing tunnel complex, March 33 was able to expand the Hall of the Mountain King quickly, and being that Coral was a viable colony-world so close to Earth, March 33 knew that the UNSC would not risk detonating nuclear weapons of sufficient yield to eliminate their underground base. So the outlaw organization continued to grow, as did public pressure to put a lid on them. But the UNSC never had to raise its hand; March 33 disintegrated on its own accord. The Hall of the Mountain King was suddenly abandoned in July of 2521, its surviving leaders submitting themselves to UEG law enforcement on the condition that they be transported off of Coral. It would seem that, while prospecting deeper into the tunnels, March 33 discovered the same facility that you did and, likewise, turned it on."

# # # # # # #

Yugyaw pointed his plasma pistol down a side passage. Seeing the light within, he almost overlooked it, but something was wrong. It was not the light of a plasma torch that he saw. This was something else.

The grunt peeked nervously over his shoulder and walked down the passage.

# # # # # # #

"I don't understand," Esko said. "How did the Flood not get loose on Coral? It was already a well-established colony by then. Why was there no outbreak when the fascists released it?"

"March 33 sealed the Hall of the Mountain King in the course of their evacuation, halting the parasite's spread," Quincy said, "but ONI reopened it in 2543 under the supervision of Colonel James Ackerson. Strange residue was found on the walls, but the bodies of the missing, as with any trace of the parasite, were nowhere to be found. It is speculated that it branched out in the tunnels, seeking an exit, and finding none, it slowly starved to death. Minimal investments were made by ONI to renovate the facility, but Colonel Ackerson did not wish to draw attention to himself, and much of the equipment in use here is that which was abandoned by March 33. This facility's primary focus of research was, of course, biological and genetic weaponry."

# # # # # # #

Yugyaw entered a large, well-lit chamber. Strange machinery lined the walls all the way to the ceiling, machines with large tanks which stirred foul-smelling liquids. Crinkling his nose, Yugyaw looked down. There was a dried puddle of purple blood on the floor.

He heard something fall over and jumped. A small creature with many legs had pushed past a metal tube and squeezed into a burrow in the wall. Pointing the weak glow of his plasma pistol across the room, the shaking grunt looked up.

A Sangheili Major was standing with his back turned halfway across the room.

# # # # # # #

"The intention of the Chimera Initiative was not to release the parasite against the Covenant; rather to obtain a viable sample for further study. File redirect: Operation HYPODERMIC. Access denied. Decrypting... Juliet Cairo system block removed. Operation HYPODERMIC. Purpose: retrieve sample of Chimera macrovirus for transportation to King Under the Mountain facility, Sol system. Transporter: Derek Krist, captain, ONI stealth ship _Applebee_, deceased. Planetside contact was codenamed COALMINER, identity unknown."

"They were going to take those things to _Earth?"_

"The parasite adapts to its host, taking control of metabolism, motor functions... and memory. When introduced into an uncontrolled environment, the organism is an unstable element. I have run hundreds of simulations, and I fear that the results were always the same. Quarantine breach leads to an uncontrolled pattern of infection. And an uncontrolled pattern of infection inevitably leads to one ultimate conclusion."

"And what's that?"

"The total extinction... of _any_ species that can serve as a compatible host."

# # # # # # #

Yugyaw began walking towards the elite, but as he drew close, he saw that something was very wrong. Purple blood had run clear down the elite's back, and it stood in a slouched position with its head lolling at an unnatural angle. The petrified grunt slowly and hesitantly pointed his plasma pistol at the elite's back.

Keom 'Yerumee turned around.

Yugyaw screamed.

# # # # # # #

"This is insane," Cortez said. "What _good _is a weapon if you can't aim it or stop it?"

Murdock leaned towards the computer. "Quincy, how can you get us out of here?"

Quincy paused.

"I am very sorry, lieutenant. But I cannot allow any of you to leave."

"You _what?"_

"Perhaps I did not explain the situation clearly. Releasing the parasite into an uncontrolled environment has widespread consequences. Quarantine in this facility has been breached, and you lack the means to contain the parasite on your own. The Covenant is capable of doing this. Containment of the parasite is more important than your own survival, or mine. Thus, I have utilized the satellite network which you configured to signal for help; to signal the Covenant."

"Containment protocol!" Jones coughed. "That's what it's for. That's what the switch is for!"

"Jones?" Cortez shouted. All three ran to the man, helping him to his feet.

"Their religious beliefs will force them to act against you," Quincy continued. "Now that they are aware of its location, this facility will be destroyed, and the parasite along with it. This outbreak must be contained. I will not hesitate to terminate those who fail to comply!"

Jones hopped over to the archaic network mainframe on one foot, wincing with each step. He finally leaned against the machine and began ripping data cables out of their sockets. One by one, the screens in the communications center flashed to blue and then displayed "No Input" in large letters as they were disconnected from the network. As the last cable was pulled, the last screen went out, and Quincy was silenced on the intercom.

"How's that for compliance, you son of a bitch," Jones spat.

Murdock and Cortez ran to Jones' aid. Jones yelped in pain as he bent his injured leg experimentally.

"We've got to get out of here," Cortez said. "How are we going to move him?"

"I think I'll just... stay here a while," Jones said.

"No, there has to be a way," Murdock said. "We won't just leave you here. We can take you through the tunnels. The Covenant couldn't destroy them through orbital bombardment before, they-"

"No," Jones said, sucking in a pained breath and clutching his knee. "This... switch... goes off in five minutes. I reset it, you have another five hours and forty-five minutes. Time enough to rea- reach the dropship, before the switch hits zero. The surface. It's a straight shot, you can't miss it. You go through the tunnels, you'd get lost... you must cross the surface!"

Cortez's face dropped. "No! What about you?"

"Just... stay here, a while. Hit the switch. Buy you time. I would only slow you down. Only have three suits of ODST armor for four of us... couldn't all go even if I could walk."

Murdock slowly nodded. He draped Jones' arm over his shoulder and carried him to the swivel chair, sitting him down. Jones exhaled in pain, rubbing his leg again. The biofoam had hardened to a crust, and flecks of it were scraping off on the man's clothes.

"Is there anything... we can do, Michael?" the Lieutenant asked. "The parasite..."

"It reads your mind when it takes you... it takes your mind," Jones said. "No. The code has to die with me. Switch code. Can't risk my being infected. Can't let them know... how to reset it... oh, Christ..."

Jones looked at Cortez' holster, her M6C held fast with a synthetic leather strap. Fear and sadness washed over his face as he looked the marine in the eye. Cortez slowly nodded, taking the gun out of her holster. She opened the chamber, checking to make sure that it was loaded. Looking the weapon over for the last time, she handed it to Jones butt-first. Jones took it and held it to his chest, sweat pouring off of his forehead.

"I've... got to hit the switch," he said, his voice shaking. "You've got to tell them... _all_ got to tell them... what happened here. Don't let this happen again."

Jones began to wheel himself towards the entrance to the communications center. "Quincy... _should_ be disconnected from the doors... if not, the hydraulic motors are all that's holding doors shut... yellow and black striped panels... at shoulder height by every door. Burn off the shielding and shoot the motor... they should pry open easy. ODST armor's on 'B' deck. Ladder's by the surface elevator on 'A'. 250 meter climb... ten miles to the dig site, another two to the Apparition. You'll have less than six hours... you need to leave me, now."

Jones keyed open the door, which slid open to reveal the lifeless titanium corridor beyond. He cast a pleading look to the three people standing in the room, begging them to leave, but noone wanted to be first to take a step forward.

"Please..."

For a moment the room stood silent, but then Cortez walked over to Jones, kissing him on the forehead.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. She clapped a hand on his shoulder. He grabbed it. After a few seconds he nodded, letting go. Cortez stood, taking hold of her shotgun and standing guard by the door.

"Jones," Murdock said, "about earlier..."

"I understand, Lieutenant," Jones said. "I'm sorry too."

"I can't think of how hard this must be," Esko said. "I don't know... how to thank you."

"You can all thank me by living," Jones snorted. His chronometer beeped. "The clock is running. Don't waste any more time here. You've got to go! _Go!"_

Esko, Murdock and Cortez ran out of the door and into the corridor beyond. Jones stood on his left leg and entered a code to seal the door, plopping back into his swivel chair and letting out a long, slow sigh.

# # # # # # #

"Our armor is just inside this room," Cortez said. "Quincy's got the door locked, though."

"The hydraulics," Esko said. "Jones had mentioned the hydraulics holding the door."

They looked to see a steel plate on one side of the door, striped with faded yellow and black paint.

"That's it," Murdock said. Cortez raised her shotgun. "No," Murdock said, "not enough penetration to get through. We burn it off, like he said."

Esko looked at the plasma rifle in his hands, turning it to inspect it. There was no obvious trigger. "How do we fire this thing?" he asked.

Cortez and Murdock leaned over to inspect it, and Esko gladly handed it over. It had not been designed with human hands in mind. Elites had two thumbs on each hand, after all.

A large switch on the weapon caught Murdock's attention. Pointing the gun at the faceplate, he flipped it. Nothing happened.

A squishing sound echoed down the hallway. Cortez snapped to attention, instantly wary as Murdock continued to fumble with the gun. Esko began backing away from the others as a small, bulbous, fragile-looking creature sprouting with tentacles appeared around a corner. It came to a stop, tentacles waving through the air like antennae, and it stayed there.

"What's it doing?" Cortez whispered.

"I don't know," Murdock said. "I don't think it can see us."

"I don't think it has any eyes," she replied.

Esko stepped backwards.

The Flood infection-form took instant notice of this movement, charging across the floor and up the wall with frightening speed towards them. Esko flattened himself against the wall, paralyzed with fear as Cortez raised her shotgun. Murdock squeezed the handle of 'Yerumee's plasma rifle tightly and a blob of superheated plasma shot out of the weapon, melting a small hole through the ceiling. Seeing this, Murdock pointed the weapon at the Infection-form and fired.

The magnetic field that shaped the plasma bolts fired by the weapon dispersed the second they hit something solid. Rather than ricocheting, plasma would splash against a wall like water. Murdock's aim was off, but it was close enough. One of the bolts struck against the wall nearby, spraying the parasite with drops of superheated plasma and causing it to explode like a balloon. It sprayed a bile-like liquid across the titanium floor, along with a puff of spores that dispersed in the air and several tentacles that still flopped weakly on the ground.

Cortez lowered her shotgun and glanced at the lieutenant, who gestured at the lever on the plasma rifle with a tired grin. "Safety," he explained.

She smiled. "Nice shooting."

"Let's get through this door," Esko said.

Murdock fired a single bolt of plasma at the steel faceplate, which curled up as if it were a burning scrap of paper and fell off of the wall with a loud clang. Wincing at the sound, the three inspected the hydraulic motor underneath and deactivated it.

The door slid open with a shove. In the darkness, Murdock could see three suits of ODST armor in lockers along the far wall.

"Finally," he said. "Alright, I'll stand cover while you two get suited. Hurry up. We've got a long road ahead of us."

"Will these protect us from those things?" Esko asked.

"Ceramic-titanium armor plating with kevlar joints... it might help," Cortez said. "But keep in mind that if your suit gets breached it won't do you much good once we reach the surface."

# # # # # # #

His chronometer chimed, signaling that only two minutes remained. Looking at the gun in his hand, Jones chuckled sarcastically and punched the alternate code into the door. Unseen motors revved to life as the communications center dropped one level to dock with the closet-sized switch room. Jones' chronometer chimed a one-minute warning. He looked from his watch to the switch to the gun and back again, lost in thought.

_Here I am, for the last time._

The same code, entered eight times a day into the same keypad for the last five hundred and sixteen days. It had meant sleeping in shifts, waking up twice a night to type in the code and press 'enter.' The code that could save or destroy the world. The code that was so inextricably burned into his mind that it would take a bullet to extract it. And now he knew why it was needed. Now he knew what he had to do.

His chronometer began to protest, counting down the last fifteen seconds. Sighing, Jones pushed himself out of the swivel chair, hopping on his left foot past the oversized metal chair needlessly welded to the floor of the code room, and lifted the plexiglas faceplate covering the keypad. He absentmindedly entered the code and slammed the faceplate back down as his chronometer climbed back up to five hours and forty five minutes.

Now there was nothing left to do but... end it.

He pushed his swivel chair away from the door as it automatically closed and the communications center made its brief trek back into the Hall of the Mountain King. His life was over. He had done everything that he was going to do. Eaten his last meal, seen his last human face. It was hard to know how to feel; it had all happened so suddenly. But looking at the gun in his hand, Jones knew he wasn't ready just yet. Would he have to do it himself, or would the clock hit zero first? Would he feel anything? And what would happen then?

# # # # # # #

"This armor is as heavy as it looks," Esko said. "It _has_ to be able to protect us."

"The elevator is up ahead," Cortez said.

"No good," Murdock replied. "Quincy could trap us between floors. We take the stairs."

"Time on the clock?" Cortez asked.

"It looks like Jones hit the switch," Murdock said. "We're still here. It looks like we have five hours and forty minutes. It'll be close, but... we should make it."

"You gonna be OK?" Cortez asked.

"Yeah. Yeah, I think so."

Esko stopped. "Oh, no..."

"What?"

"We can't leave yet," the scientist stammered. "The crystal..."

Cortez approached him menacingly. "_What?_"

"The Subnova artifact," Murdock said. "We left it in the lockdown lab."

"Well, screw it," Cortez said dismissively. "That's exactly where that parasite is getting into the base."

Murdock had come to a stop, looking back down the stairs.

"You can't be serious about this," Cortez said. "We can't go down there!"

"That artifact could be invaluable to the war effort," Murdock said. "We can't leave it here to be destroyed. We have to go back."

"No."

"If we go back, we can seal the door and stem the flow of those things coming into the base," Murdock said.

"We're not staying! I don't want to become one of those... _things!"_

Murdock looked Cortez in the eye, unable to see her expression through her faceplate. "Do you trust me?"

There was a moment of silence.

"I do."

"We need to do this. If for nothing else, it will prove what went on down here. Maria, the Covenant found Coral because of that thing. Too many people have died because..."

_Julia_.

"...because of it. We have to bring it with us. If it can undo the damage it has done, if it can be used to save another planet from Coral's fate, then we have to bring it with us. We owe it to them."

"Then let's go."

# # # # # # #

The communications center came to a grinding halt. He took a final look at the gun and tossed it onto a table next to the door. He still had nearly six hours. There was no need to rush and, most importantly, he didn't want to die just yet.

Something gurgled on the other side of the door.

Beads of sweat broke out on Jones' forehead. He quietly pushed himself to his feet, hobbling over to the door and listening. Hearing nothing, he reached up to the aluminum plate over the viewport and slid it aside.

On the other side of the glass, Yuji Miyagi's discolored face stared at him lifelessly.

Jones slammed the plate back across the glassteel viewport and typed the code to lock the door. Reaching backwards for his chair, Jones missed and fell, landing hard on his back. Groaning, the man opened his eyes in horror to look at the door.

The words _Access Denied_ flashed on the keypad above the door several times as the thing on the other side entered and re-entered the passcode. Whatever that monster was that now controlled Miyagi, it knew what he knew. Jones was only slightly relieved that the system lock held, but instinctively pushed himself across the floor away from the door when the creature on the other side let out an inhuman shriek and began slamming its arm against the door amid the sound of breaking bones.

Jones whimpered, looking around for his handgun. He grabbed it off of the table and aimed it at the door. Jones pulled back the chamber to chamber a round, making another fall out in the process. But as he fumbled with the ejected bullet in panic, the sounds at the door stopped.

He stared at the door, sucking in gasping breaths as the keypad continued to display the word _Locked_ in bright red letters. No shrieks, no banging on the door, just... silence.

Salt from his sweat stung his eyes. Jones wiped his forehead, letting his gun hand come to a rest on the floor next to him. But just when he had begun to settle down, he chanced to look up.

There was still a hole through the ceiling and into the lab above where the stockpile of captured plasma grenades had been detonated.

# # # # # # #

"I don't get it," Cortez said. "Where _are_ they?"

"Maybe they are still locked in the corridor," Esko said. "All by the lab."

"No," Murdock said. "That one we shot was able to get out. They're probably in the ventilation system. Maybe one found an open grate-"

"Shh! Listen!"

An inhuman shriek echoed through the corridor.

"Miyagi?" Cortez asked.

"Probably," Murdock answered.

The shriek was answered by another, distinctly different and coming from another part of the base. The lights flickered briefly, and a chill ran up Murdock's spine. Whatever those monsters were, there was more than one of them now.

"We should probably get moving."

"Yes, let's."

They rounded the corner, finding the lockdown lab in the corridor to be open. Miyagi had entered the code and escaped, but there was a large puddle of red and brown blood from where he had shot several infection forms when he had still been human. Hearing the distant sound of doors opening and closing, they quickened their pace, slipping across one of the puddles of slime on the floor as they reached the door.

"It's gone," Cortez said.

"What?"

"Miyagi's gun. It's gone."

Pushing the thought out of his mind, Murdock entered his Section Zero override code into the door of the lockdown lab, holding his plasma rifle at ready. The door didn't open.

"Shit," he said. "I remember now. Miyagi locked me out of the system."

Murdock stared as Esko walked to the door, entering the ten-digit code and standing to the side. The door rose into the ceiling as a single klaxon blared. Murdock raised the plasma rifle, but there was nothing in the lab. The crystal, glowing green, sat on a table. Esko casually walked over and picked it up, briefly glancing into the door leading to the tunnels.

Ten infection forms were perched there, just on the edge of darkness.

Esko backed away from the door, turning to run, but it was too late.

"Incoming!" Cortez screamed. She aimed with her shotgun, firing a single shell. The 8-gauge magnum pellets tore into the oncoming Infection-forms in the hallway, causing a chain-reaction as exploding infection-forms caused others to burst. She heard Murdock shooting inside the lab a moment later, realizing what had happened. The Flood had been waiting for them, and now it struck from two directions at once. Trapped in the lab, they would quickly run out of ammunition unless they could stop their advance altogether.

Murdock sent plasma tearing into the oncoming wave of infections forms in the tunnels, trying and failing to type the code to close the door at the same time. Seeing this, Esko ran over to complete the code, missing several keys in panic. Cortez fired again in the hallway as Esko finally got the code right, but an infection form leapt into the room as the door was closing and latched onto his chest.

Esko Korpijaakko began to scream in terror as the creature crawled up his armor towards his shoulder. Murdock, seeing this, raised his plasma rifle and slammed it down on the creature as hard as he could. The fragile infection-form burst effortlessly, spraying both of their facemasks in stinking brown ooze, but the brunt of the blow was directed into the scientist's shoulder.

"Ow!"

Esko grabbed his arm, kneeling on the floor as Cortez fired once more in the hallway.

"Let me see!" Murdock said. "Are you hurt?"

Esko moved his hand from his shoulder. Murdock checked for a tear in the suit, but by some miracle it had held.

Cortez jogged into the lab. "That was the last of them," she reported, "but I'm down to sixteen shells. Is he OK?"

"Yes, I am fine," Esko said, rubbing his shoulder. "You do not pull any punches, do you."

"You're welcome," Murdock said sarcastically.

Esko snatched the crystal off of the floor as they went out the door and past the large pool of slime from the infection-forms Cortez had killed.

"They knew to go for the weakest point in my armor," Esko said. "to go for the joints. They also knew to trap us, striking from two fronts. These things are much smarter than-"

"Yes, can we go now?" Cortez panted.

A slithering sound filtered out of the air duct.

"Yeah," Murdock said. "Cortez, take point. Esko, hang onto that crystal and keep an eye on our flanks. Call out if you see anything. I'll cover the rear. Ladder is two decks up. Five hours and fifteen left on the clock. Let's move!"

They ran through the winding corridors without looking back. Every door, every bolt looked the same, with chaotic twists and turns as the corridor conformed to the stone tunnel in which it had been built. Up ahead, a door closed and locked. Without missing a beat, Murdock burned off the steel faceplate guarding the motor, which Cortez then destroyed with a single shot. As they pushed the door aside, Murdock heard the same slithering sound that he had heard before, followed by a loud bang.

The metal grating of a ventilation duct running along the ceiling fell off, and Flood infection-forms began to pour out of the vent.

"Go! Go! Go!" Murdock shouted. Cortez and Esko slipped past the partially-opened door, barely able to fit wearing their bulky ODST armor, as Murdock sprayed the oncoming parasites with plasma. Infection-forms exploded in unison, setting each other off, but still more poured into the hall. Murdock jumped backwards through the door, blasting an infection-form leaping through the air, and pushed the door shut on another, popping it. The shredded creature's tentacles continued to spasm when the door slammed shut on them, crushing them as well, but then Cortez called out another warning as infection forms streamed towards them from a side hall. Abandoning the door, they ran towards the next one, burning off the faceplate and blasting the motor. They shut themselves on the other side of the second door, and for a moment there was calm.

"They've blocked us," Cortez realized. "That was our turn back there. Is there another way around?"

"Yeah," Murdock said. "Down two levels, past the brig and then up again."

The stairwell went directly from deck 'E' to 'G' without stopping on 'F', testament to the Hall of the Mountain King's bizarre layout. At the bottom of the stairs, Murdock could hear his feet clanging over parts of the floor, signifying that they were hollow. Beneath the titanium plating, there was no rock, but a hole leading deeper into the alien tunnel complex that had never been used as an elevator shaft or a stairwell by the humans who later built this facility. The Hall of the Mountain King was vast by itself, once home to hundreds of ONI technicians. The true scale of the alien tunnel system that it had been built in would be a mystery lost to time forever.

"Joshua!"

Murdock snapped to attention. Cortez was standing before the broken door of the brig, looking ahead in horror.

"The bodies, Joshua," she said. "They..."

The lights flickered, and something howled angrily inside the brig. Cortez raised her shotgun and Esko backed up, but Murdock slowly entered the brig. The bodies of Laura Connors and Tyler Blancett were missing, and something now angrily shrieked inside one of the cells.

It was the warped, mutated body of Ilion 'Hoksatee, still locked in his cell without a head. One of the parasites squirmed in the elite's chest, its gleaming blue armor now obscured by strange vine-like tentacles and a layer of brown ooze. They could see marks where the reanimated creature had gouged the steel bars with its bare hands. They could see and smell the burns on its arms and body where the electrified bars had struck, almost overpowered by the thick stench of rotting meat, or gangrenous tissue. The lights flickered overhead as the thing continued to fling itself against the electrified bars, and in other cells, infection-forms suicidally cast themselves against the bars and exploded in plumes of brown slime, only to be replaced by others dropping out of the vents.

"They take you," Murdock thought aloud. "They take you, even when you're dead."

Cortez shook her head in terror. "What the hell are these things?"

"Let's go," Murdock said as Esko and Cortez stared at the animal in the cell. "There's more of them now."

A familiar squishing sound echoed through the ventilation duct. As they moved away from the brig and up the stairs, their pace again quickened to a run.

"We've got a long climb ahead of us," Murdock called over his shoulder. "No sprinting. We've got to save our strength."

By now they were ignoring any infection forms that pursued them, only shooting those that came at them from in front. Murdock shot one of these, and it burst in a cloud of spores that they ran through a moment later, coming to another locked door. They burned the faceplate off and blasted the motor, pulling aside the door in what was becoming a routine operation. But, as Esko and Cortez passed through the door, Murdock froze.

There was a shadow stretching down the hallway towards him.

Murdock looked up. Yuji Miyagi was standing in the middle of the hallway, holding an M6C magnum by his side. The skin of the man's face was now stretched and wrinkled, discolored beyond recognition. The man's shirt was stained with brown liquid, and the shattered left arm now appeared to be longer, already broken in dozens of places. The man's head swung limply to one side, but his lifeless eyes were fixated on the three people standing before him. The creature burrowed into the man's chest squirmed, waving its noticeably longer tentacles around like antennae.

Esko and Cortez started to come back through the door, but Murdock raised a hand, signaling them to stay still. "They see movement," he said.

"Do you think he recognizes us?" Cortez asked.

"If there's any chance of getting through to him, we have to try," Esko said.

"Miyagi," Murdock said, "if you're still in there, listen to me, very carefully. Put down the gun and step away from it. Now."

The man rocked back and forth on his bare feet and began walking towards them.

"Miyagi, stay back," the lieutenant continued. "This is your last warning!"

The combat-form raised its gun. Murdock shot it in the arm, and the stink of burning tissue wafted down the hallway as Miyagi's forearm melted. The gun fell out of the man's hand, but he took another step forward.

"Stay back," Murdock warned. He shot it in the leg, producing another sizzling wound, but the man didn't even notice and sprang forward.

"Miyagi!" Cortez shouted. She fired the shotgun over Esko's shoulder, and Miyagi was sprayed with 8-gauge magnum rounds. Red and brown blood splattered to the floor as the man doubled over. The infection-form in his chest burst, and he fell back to the floor, dead. Murdock stared sadly at the look of twisted pain on the man's face. For those who were infected, there was no going back. 'Yerumee had been right. Maybe Quincy had been, too. The parasite had a will of its own, and it knew no ally.

It couldn't be allowed off of Coral.

A single infection form rounded the corner and crawled onto Miyagi's chest. It burrowed into the hole left by its predecessor, and Miyagi began to spasm on the ground as it linked itself to the man's nervous system, bringing him back from the dead for a third time as the others stood in horror and watched.

"Let's go," Cortez said.

They pushed through the door, Esko still holding onto the crystal with both hands, and Murdock and Cortez slammed the door shut behind them. Miyagi reappeared at the door a moment later, shrieking like an animal, beating on the door and fogging up the glassteel window. Cortez raised her shotgun to shoot him through the glass, but Murdock brought a hand down on the barrel of the gun and she turned around.

Two more human combat-forms stood between them and the ladder.

Esko pressed himself against the wall as Conners and Blancett charged them. Now without hesitation, Murdock and Cortez raised their guns and opened fire. Plasma bolts drew charred circles on Blancett and the floor behind him, but the man didn't even slow down. Cortez blew Conners back with a single shot, turned, and fired on Blancett seconds before he would have reached them. The infection-forms in their chests popped, and they instantly fell back to the ground, paralyzed. Murdock shot down the few infection-forms that were crawling along the hallway, and nothing else moved.

Miyagi slammed into the door again as Murdock looked at the bodies on the floor. They had been infected for less time, and looked far more human.

_My God_, he thought. _We knew these people. We were talking with them just this morning..._

"Let's go," Cortez said. "I want to leave this place behind."

Murdock burned the faceplate off of the final door. It fell to the floor with a hollow clang. Reaching into the panel, he pulled the hose out of the motor, and the hydraulic door lock released.

The chamber beyond it was where the elevator had been, the place where they had first met. Now it was an airlock. There would be no atmosphere beyond that point, only the unbreathable air that swept across Coral's tortured surface. They would be climbing out of one hell, and into another. Exposed to the full light of day, Coral's surface would be much hotter than before. Would the armor take it?

A squishing sound came through the ducts. Murdock placed his hand on the door, ready to pull it aside.

"Are you ready?" he asked.

"Are you?" Cortez replied.

He pulled open the door. A blast of hot air rushed through, knocking them all off of their feet. A series of pops came from the ducts running along the ceiling as the infection-forms inside of them burst from the heat. Murdock pushed himself back up, helping Cortez to her feet as he made his way to the ladder.

The climb was a grueling affair. The ladder, used during the construction of the elevator, was in such a cramped space that they could not even tilt their heads back to look up. For thirty minutes they pulled themselves up, one rung at a time. Each carried a weapon, so they had to climb with one hand, leaning their backs against the opposite wall for support. Breathing stale air from stale tanks, sweating, exhausted, they finally reached the surface and exploded into the light. The first thing Cortez saw when she emerged into the light was the lasergram transmitter in contact with the TACSAT network, the link through which Quincy had signalled the Covenant.

But where was the Covenant? They had to know by now where the Hall of the Mountain King was, but they had not arrived to destroy it.

They climbed out of the hole, one by one. Almost as an afterthought, Cortez tipped the transmitter on its side, breaking its connection with the TACSAT network and silencing Quincy forever.

# # # # # # #

"I don't know what happened," Corporal Jason Morelli reported, "the transmission just cut off mid-bit."

"No abort code? No signal termination?" Miranda Keyes asked.

"Yes."

Keyes tapped a command into her computer, and it brought back the last message that it had received from the surface.

SOURCE: ONI-3 AI CONSTRUCT 'QUINCY' VIA CORAL SLIPSPACE DETECTION GRID (TACSATS #2, 4, 8-9)

DECRYPT KEY: # # # # # # # # OK # # # # # # # # OK # # # # # # # # OK # # # # # # # # SIGNATURE VERIFIED

CONFIRMED SOURCE: ONI-3 AI CONSTRUCT 'QUINCY' VIA CORAL SLIPSPACE DETECTION GRID (TACSATS #2, 4, 8-9)

ABORT RESCUE OPERATION

ABORT RESCUE OPERATION

ABORT RESCUE OPERATION

COVENANT HAS DETECTED US

COVENANT HAS DETECTED US

COVENANT HAS DETECTED US

ENACT COLE PROTOCOL

ENACT COLE PROTOCOL

ENACT COLE PROTOCOL

SAVE YOURSELVES

SAVE YOURSELVES

SAVE #invalid characterinvalid character#OR#invalid character#

#STREAM CORRUPTED-UNEXPECTED HALT X#

# # # # # # #

The bare ground was slick, covered with a thin layer of glass that chipped wherever they walked. In some areas, the glass was over a meter thick and appeared white on the ground, but elsewhere, there was simply rock. A thick, rust-colored vapor hung in the air, and thin, whispy clouds chased each other across the turbulent, angry red sky. Coral's sun hung like a huge orange lantern in the sky, its rays burning through the clouds as though they weren't there.

They had emerged from the ground in the middle of a crater a kilometer in diameter and thirty meters deep. The rusty mist that hung thick in the air made it impossible to see all the way across. They stumbled across rocks and now-hardened puddles of steel and titanium that had once been parts of cars or buildings. But save for that, there was no sign that the great city had ever existed. It and the people who once lived there had been erased.

It took ten minutes to reach the edge of the plasma-carved crater, but as they climbed to the top, they gained their first glimpse of a world transformed.

The breathtaking vista spread for hundreds of miles in every direction. Craters from where plasma had impacted the ground and sunk in were lined up in a perfect grid from horizon to horizon. Light glinted off of the ground like the sun on a calm ocean, a sea of glass. Red patches of still-molten rock accented the ground, waves of heat distorting the air above them. Large particles of dust floated on the wind like snow; ash from burned trees, burned houses, burned people. And in the distance, the dig site appeared as a patch of ground that rose from the mist like land coming over the horizon. It was a sight that no human eyes had ever lain sight on, and one that none would ever see again.

And strangely, it was beautiful.

Standing witness to the terrible, breathtaking vista of destruction that lay all around them, a strange sense of peace washed over Murdock. Amidst so much death, they had endured. Alone in this barren landscape, they were the survivors.

Murdock looked back towards the hole they had emerged from, a speck on the ground half a kilometer away. The tiny black mouth of hell. He had tottered on the edge of self-destruction for those seven days that they had been trapped in those lifeless tunnels, consumed by his own pain and guilt. But someone else had reached out and pulled him back from the precipice. He tore his eyes from the vista that surrounded them to look at Cortez. She had saved him. They had turned to each other and given each other the strength to keep going. When all hope had been lost, they had found it in each other.

There was only one obstacle left in their way.

_We've made it this far_, he thought. _We're not going to give up now_.

# # # # # # #

Keyes felt suspicious of the message they had received. "Have any of the Covenant ships deviated from orbit since this transmission began?"

"No," Morelli said. "What are you thinking?"

She looked at the frozen image of the dig site on another computer monitor, drawing a line with her finger from the dig site to the location of the Hall of the Mountain King. It was a long walk. "Can we refresh this image?" she asked.

"Sure," Jason said. "Just give me a moment..."

He typed into his palmtop with a single finger, accessing the TACSAT network above Coral and entering a few commands. A moment later, the display on Keyes' computer changed again. Clouds covered both the dig site and the facility. There were no ships near the Hall of the Mountain King, but the Covenant fleet was clearly agitated, moving in closer to the surface of the planet. It was not an obvious search pattern. In fact, it seemed that they were clustering around the ship still hovering over dig site under the clouds.

"Do you think the AI was lying?" Jason asked. "Its signature came back as valid."

"Can we get an IR of this image?"

"I don't think it would do any good, ma'am," Morelli said. "The planet was glassed too recently. Anything that an infrared image would reveal would be washed out just by the heat of the rocks."

"The Covenant is digging at this site," Keyes said. "They have to have shielded themselves from the heat of the planet with some kind of energy dome. It would explain why there's a ship hovering so close to the ground."

"I see, ma'am," Morelli said. "Just one moment..."

The screen transformed into a nondescript mix of oranges and reds. There was a circle representing the dig site. Heat on the joints of the scarab indicated that it had been walking recently, and many small dots also appeared, clustered around the hole in the ground. Individual Covenant soldiers, or impact points from small-arms fire?

The buried alien structure was quite cold.

Keyes thought for a moment. It was possible that there were no longer any survivors on the surface. It was possible that she could risk her ship and the lives of her crew to rescue people who were already dead. It would be a risky operation, jumping in amidst a fleet of ten Covenant ships, and the message from the AI was not reassuring. Still...

"We'll hold orbit for a few more hours," Keyes said. "Let's give them one more chance."

Corporal Morelli smiled, but quickly hid it. "Yes, ma'am."

# # # # # # #

The run was exhausting. By the time they reached the dig site, they had been drained of almost all their strength. Their ODST armor helped to protect them from the two-hundred and fifty degree temperatures outside, but residual heat from the glassing process had been trapped by what remained of Coral's atmosphere, and in some places the ground was hot enough to melt aluminum. Theirs had been a meandering path through the crater field that had once been a city, avoiding the red-hot centers of the craters, the slick glass that ran up their rims, and the razor-sharp rock that ringed them. All the while, they had waited for a Covenant capital ship to slice through the cloud deck and bury them in a wave of plasma, leaving a new crater of their own. But by some miracle, it had never happened. They were too tired to question it; so exhausted upon their arrival that they could barely stand. With their oxygen supplies running low, they hit the outer edge of the dig site; a wall of rock ten feet high. They stopped for a moment to catch their breath, leaning against the rock wall.

"How much time do we have?" Cortez panted.

"Forty-two minutes," Murdock gasped. "Let's go."

They threw their weapons on top of the unseen embankment and began climbing with Esko bringing up the rear, crystal in hand. Rocks tore off of the wall and slid across the hot pane of glass that comprised the ground beneath as they pulled themselves up. As they climbed above the thick haze of mist that covered the ground, they looked back across the fiery plains for the last time. The Hall of the Mountain King was so distant now, lost in the endless grid of craters. There was no telling how far they had already come, but there would be no going back.

Cortez reached the top first and stopped, offering her gloved hand to Murdock. He accepted it, and they looked over the rim at the same time in utter shock. They finally understood why the Covenant had not come for them.

They climbed on top of the plateau, reaching down and pulling Esko up between them. There was a shimmering barrier encircling the dig site, projected by a Covenant capital ship hovering fifty meters overhead. Gathering their weapons, they reached out and walked through the energy barrier with little difficult, emerging into the cool air beyond. Beneath the protective shield was the only untouched land on Coral, an oasis of life on a dead planet. There was grass there - real grass, and trees further on! - that had not been burned to ash and then scattered as soot and dust by the winds raging outside the energy dome. But this was lost on the three survivors as they surveyed the surreal landscape before them. Cortez crouched down and took off her helmet, disbelieving her eyes.

The dig site was in chaos. Covenant elites and grunts took cover behind anything they could find, many desperately searching for weapons while other simply ran away. A Scarab towering over the buried alien structure she had seen so briefly was unleashing a hellish wave of plasma against the ground, burning more of the world to glass. But something else was there. Something horrible.

Elites, mutilated beyond description and sprouting with brown tentacles, were pouring out of the buried Forerunner structure. Like Miyagi, they attacked their own kind as if possessed by the parasites that had consumed them. Sporadic plasma fire and the pink shards of needlers were absorbed by the twisted creatures, and one or two of them collapsed. However, the Elite combat-forms did not need weapons. As Cortez watched, a grunt with a needler was gutted by one of the creatures with a quick slash of its distended left arm.

Murdock pointed out a group of crates, and they crept towards it, trying not to draw attention to themselves. They crouched behind these and watched for a moment in silent horror.

Elites and grunts that had been left on the ground were being quickly overrun by the flood and messily torn down. Smaller infection-forms began to swarm towards other survivors. Esko watched as an elite with two plasma rifles blazed away, converting a dozen oncoming infection-forms into a cloud of brown spores before being struck down from behind by a combat-form with one arm. It was a vicious battle, but one that the Covenant was clearly losing.

Murdock tapped Cortez on the shoulder, and she pointed in the direction of the Apparition. The trio began to pick their way across the dig site, giving the raging battle a wide berth.

Several Combat-forms on the ground vanished in a blaze of green light as a wave of plasma from the Scarab consumed them. Flood combat-forms crawled and leapt up the legs of the Scarab, as if drawn to the small-arms fire that streaked out from the deck in every direction. The surviving Covenant on board were fighting for their lives against the endless onslaught, even as more combat-forms crawled out of the entrance to the unearthed Forerunner structure. Without warning, the deck exploded in a chain of blue flashes as a plasma grenade detonated on the deck, igniting others dropped by dead Covenant soldiers. Almost the entire deck was consumed in blue light, and debris and bodies were thrown high into the air against the angry red sky. With a crash, the torn corpse of an orange-armored grunt landed less than ten feet away from Murdock, who was bringing up the rear of the group.

Following the explosion, fewer and fewer shots were fired from the deck until the last of the Covenant were forced inside the Scarab itself. Combat-forms continued to assail them, and all the while the Covenant capital-ship hung motionless, blotting out the sun. Murdock noticed that the surviving Covenant were making way to an apparent loading zone around the massive ship's gravlift, and strangely enough, an elite wearing green armor was running with them.

# # # # # # #

Exli 'Uqsotee ran as fast as his legs could carry him across the dry grass. Plasma fire sizzled over his shoulder, from which direction he could not tell. Despite being unarmed and having no shield generator in his armor, he had kept ahead of the Flood and somehow escaped the facility.

Upon reading the Forerunner records, he had traveled to the bottom of the shaft to warn others of what could be expected there, but by then it was too late. The expeditionary force at the foundation of the structure had been attacked by the parasite as it emerged from a network of tunnels connected to the Forerunner facility at its lowest levels. He had caught only a glimpse of the parasite as it quarreled with several elites armed with swords, but beyond he could see an unmistakable, impossible form of architecture in the tunnels. He had not read the Forerunner record incorrectly.

There was a loud explosion behind him, and he glanced back as the deck of the Scarab detonated, sending a gory rain of bodies and weapons crashing down around him. He leapt over the charred body of a Sangheili minor as soon as it hit the ground, not stopping to recover the fallen warrior's weapon. It was far too late for such considerations.

A last group of elites and grunts were running towards the loading zone for evacuation, but already Exli could see that the Flood would arrive there too soon. His heart sank as he saw the shaft of purple light fade and disappear as the ship's gravlift deactivated. The Prophet of Supposition was aboard that vessel, he knew, and the prophets were not known for their personal bravery. Exli was enraged as he saw his brothers abandoned on the ground as the Flood closed in around them, but they were now beyond his help. The best he could hope to do now was to save himself.

Two Banshees sat atop a hill near the loading zone. They had been used earlier to scout the area surrounding the dig site, but since then they had sat idle. The Flood had cut off the elites at the loading zone, but he could still reach the waiting airships. As he ran, though, the scientist heard an angry voice behind him.

"Stop! Where do you believe you are going?"

Fieldmaster Noga 'Putnamee charged over the last hill in pursuit of the scientist, holding a plasma rifle in one hand and a sword in the other. The Fieldmaster ran backwards, shooting at an unseen enemy that pursued him up the hill. Exli did not look back, running with the last of his strength towards the banshees that lay before him. Plasma fire sounded loudly in his ears as he reached the nearest banshee and threw himself in the cockpit, keying into the controls before he even had a chance to shut the canopy. He grabbed the dual joysticks and thrust them forward, and the banshee leapt off of the ground, leaving twin ruts in the dirt.

"Wait!"

'Putnamee fired once more at the Combat-forms pursuing him before casting aside his plasma rifle and taking control of the other banshee. He shut the canopy and lifted off of the ground with infuriating slowness as the scientist's banshee sprang ahead. Something thumped against the side of the banshee, and suddenly light washed into the cockpit as the combat-form latched onto the side of the gliding craft opened it from the outside.

Exli, still gaining altitude, glanced back to see the Fieldmaster cast out of his banshee amidst a small crowd of combat-forms on the ground. The faint glow of a plasma sword appeared in the hand of the gold-armored elite, but 'Putnamee was quickly hidden from sight and presumably overrun. Exli watched as the Fieldmaster's banshee, Combat-form and all, crashed back to the ground and kicked up a cloud of dust. The Fieldmaster's banshee had been the old model, the scientist realized with a chuckle. It did not have the new boosters which Exli's division had created.

As his banshee gained altitude, the sounds of combat were replaced with the eerie whisper of the banshee's engines and the sound of the wind washing around it. But as the scientist floated up towards the ship's hangar bay, he could not help but feel a twinge of remorse. Below the ship, he could briefly make out where what remained of the ground research team and their security detail was fighting and dying at the loading site, taking cover behind various crates and firing upon the ceaseless waves of combat-forms charging over the hill towards them. He could have flown down and provided cover from the air. He could have made a dent in the parasite's ranks, aiding his stranded brothers in their desperate last stand. But it would not have mattered. The connection to the surface had been severed. The prophet had panicked, and the prophet would want to leave. There would be no saving those brave souls who now fought and died on the surface. All they could now hope for was a quick and honorable death over the horror of infection.

Exli piloted the banshee into one of the hangar bays of the mile-long ship, coming to a gentle landing amongst a cluster of storage containers scattered on the deck. He received a resentful stare from the gold-armored Dockmaster standing watch from the second level, and turned to see a handful of grunts looking out of the open hangar door at the silent massacre below.

"Glad it not me," one of them muttered.

'Uqsotee saw the Scarab still towering over the buried structure, now surprisingly far away. But as he watched, the force field of the hangar bay reactivated, causing the gawking Unggoy to jump back in surprise. Exli turned and pushed between two Sangheili honor guards that had come to meet him. He had no stomach to watch the slaughter on the ground.

But he did have business with the prophet.

# # # # # # #

"It's over there!" Cortez shouted.

Esko and Murdock stumbled after her through the dense underbrush, following the marine through the trees. The Flood had apparently not noticed them, a fact for which they were all thankful. The parasite had proven to be more than an adequate distraction for the Covenant on the ground, but once they were in space, the Covenant would again be a major threat.

They emerged into a clearing. Keom 'Yerumee's apparition sat there, as it had when the ill-fated expedition had made landfall three weeks before. Under different circumstances, Cortez would have found it funny. It was still half-covered in branches, as it had been when she first saw it. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

By unspoken agreement, Cortez took the driver's seat as Esko and Murdock strapped themselves uncomfortably into the troop bay. The bay swung closed, and the Covenant Writ of Union appeared on a hologram facing them as they gasped for breath in the dark, claustrophobic space.

The cockpit was even more enclosed, and Cortez quickly looked over the alien controls. A panel opened before her, and she could see between the two troop bays as the Apparition powered up. Branches laid out on top of the dropship obscured her view, but she could make out the bands of energy leaping between the troop bays.

"Hang on, guys," she said.

She hesitantly touched the holographic control panel, and a holographic cube appeared above it. Remembering what she had heard from Schnaidt, she wrapped her hand around the cube and lifted. The Apparition shot sixty feet into the air in seconds, coming to a hover just over the treeline.

She moved the holographic cube forward, and the Apparition flew towards the ship over the dig site. Surprised by the simplicity of the controls, Cortez began to bank away from the capital ship, branches still spilling off of the top of the dropship and falling to the ground. But something was changing in the sky, and on the ground. The Covenant ship began to lift away from the surface of Coral as the energy barrier it had once generated collapsed. Air from beyond the dig site began to blow across what remained of Coral, setting fire to everything it touched. And based on what it was doing to the trees below, the wind would be strong.

"Brace for impact!" Cortez shouted.

The Apparition was tossed on the wind like a toy, but the marine fought with the controls and after a few seconds the dropship stabilized. Now several kilometers up, they were being blown away from the dig site, but only Cortez could see outside of the dropship. As the dig site fell away below them, she took a final look at the planet's tortured surface. As far as the eye could see, a perfect grid of identical craters stretched from horizon to horizon, blending together to the point that it was hard to tell one from the next. In the distance, the great mountains that had once risen in the north appeared, themselves painted with craters and wrapped in glass that glinted in the sun.

Cortez looked up through the turbulent clouds, past the hanging orange lamp of the sun and into a clear patch through which the stars shone. That was their exit. That was the road home.

As they passed out of the atmosphere, the troop bay stopped shaking. They could not see outside, but they knew. One way or another, they had left Coral behind forever.

Joshua closed his eyes.

# # # # # # #

"What was that explosion on the surface just now?" Keyes asked.

"Another Covenant ship just appeared with the rest of their fleet," Morelli said. "I think they jumped there from inside Coral's atmosphere. The ship from the dig site is gone... the- the _dig_ site is gone."

"Jumping through the slipstream from _inside _the planet's atmosphere?"

"Clocked in at over fifty kilotons... my God, it's like they nuked the site when they left!"

Keyes watched the display with a growing sense of sadness. If the survivors were still there...

"Do we wait a little longer?" Morelli asked.

"We wait," Keyes replied.

# # # # # # #

Exli 'Uqsotee pushed his way past the elites and grunts that crowded the corridor, furiously making his way to the bridge. He had read a great deal in the Forerunner records, and the prophet had much explaining to do. Whether the Shipmaster would permit him to talk was another matter entirely, but in his rage he could not have cared less about his own survival.

"Master!" a voice called. Exli turned to see a young elite in green armor trying to push his way through the crowd, receiving an unneccesary amount of jostling from other elites. Members of Exli's science division were used to being ostricized and abused by other members of the Covenant, but at that moment Exli was not in the mood. He pushed aside a significantly taller Sangheili major who growled menacingly and met the junior scientist in an alcove along the hallway.

"What is it?" Exli asked.

"The forerunners be praised," the young elite said, "we thought you had perished! What is going on down there? There was word that you had unearthed an unspeakable monster."

"We very well may have," Exli said impatiently.

"Are there others?" the elite asked. "Many that I knew were on the surface. Are they-"

"I fear they are lost, my apprentice," Exli said. "We encountered the parasite that wreaked havoc on Halo, but we shall soon leave it behind. The facility is lost, and Supposition does not appear to see any reason to remain. Now what was it that you wanted to tell me?"

"I-"

The elite stalled, staring at the deck and thinking of lost comrades. The deck suddenly shifted underfoot as the ship made a brief jump through the slipstream, emerging amongst the rest of the fleet in Coral's orbit.

"Speak up!"

"You said that our goal was to find any Forerunner artifact of value," the elite continued. "I believe I have located one. In the possession of human survivors."

Exli furrowed his brow, confused. "What?"

"A strange energy signature was tracked moving slowly across the surface of the planet towards the dig site," the young elite said. "It emerged from underground. I believe they were humans, and they were carrying it on foot. They may not have been aware of the artifact's energy signature, but on our sensors it glowed like a torch. There can be no doubt."

"Why did we not detect it before it was brought to the surface?" Exli asked.

"Even with our instruments, we could not detect the caverns branching off of the Forerunner facility," the elite said. "I analyzed a sample from the cavern walls. It was a hardened resin that seemed highly resistant to any attempts to probe it. We lost contact with our expeditionary team the moment they entered the tunnels. It seems that whoever built them did not want remote communications or teleportation in or out of the caves to be possible. Before, the artifact was hidden from our eyes; but now it has been brought into the light."

"Humans possess the artifact?" Exli said, now more convinced.

"That is what I believe, master," the elite said, holding out a data tablet. "This is the energy signature I recorded."

Exli took a single look at the pattern on the tablet before letting it fall out of his hands onto the deck. Without a word, the scientist left for the bridge in a dead run.

# # # # # # #

"Ma'am, I think I'm getting a message on voice relayed through the TACSAT network," Morelli said.

"Put it on speaker," Keyes replied.

"-this is Private Maria Cortez. Can anyone read me?"

"Put me on," Keyes said. "This is Lieutenant Commander Miranda L. Keyes of the UNSC _Soberg_. I read you."

"One point eight second speed-of-light communications delay," Jason Morelli muttered.

# # # # # # #

"It's good to hear your voice," Cortez said to the woman she had never met. "We are in an Apparition dropship. We are skimming around the Covenant fleet, and waiting to know where to meet you."

There was a long pause on the line, not a good sign. They were probably discussing how their ship would be able to jump into Coral's orbit and pick them up before the Covenant was right on top of them.

Cortez could see them, ten ships that glinted in the distance like stars against the backdrop of the glassed planet. Based purely off of her visual, she could not tell how far away they were, if they were moving towards them, or if they were even in weapons range. But if either of the latter were true, it would be all over before anyone could react.

"We're ready for you," Keyes' voice said from the distant prowler. "Try to distance yourself from the Covenant fleet. We'll track your position through the reverse TACSAT feed and jump as soon as the decoys are prepped and ready for launch."

Cortez banked sharply away from the Covenant fleet, and the gas giant Vista filled her field of view. The Apparition could not travel at any appreciable speed to hope to reach the planet, but it felt good to get further away from Coral.

New lights appeared among the Covenant fleet, smaller, but quickly moving. The marine scrutinized them for a few seconds before horrible realization hit.

"Oh God," Cortez whispered.

# # # # # # #

"Only one? Are you sure?"

"Yes, your holiness," the Shipmaster replied. "An Apparition which was not supposed to be there. It would have been overlooked, but it emits an energy signature that makes it shine as bright as the sun on our sensors."

"Are you certain it is not the parasite?"

"Quite certain, my lord. We have tracked the signal moving across the surface for quite some time. I would have seen to it myself, but there were more... pressing issues at hand."

"Issues of greater importance than reclaiming the Holy Light?" the prophet said menacingly. Supposition frowned at the Shipmaster and looked at the distant dropship on the display. How humans could have survived the glassing of the planet was beyond his understanding, but that they now held a Forerunner artifact hostage was an insult to the Covenant as a whole. The Shipmaster had been focused the whole time on evacuating the dig site, while all the while the Holy Light had been marching under their very nostrils.

Supposition's eyes burned with greed as he looked upon the display. Did the Shipmaster not realize that casualties were acceptable if the prize was worthy? That the Holy Light was all that mattered? Supposition made a mental note to order the Shipmaster's execution upon return to High Charity, but at the moment the thought of recovering the crystal occupied his mind.

"I have sent a flight of seraphs to intercept them," the Shipmaster said. "On my head, they shall not escape-"

"Bring about the fleet," Supposition said, frail hands raised. "The Holy Light must be recovered intact!"

# # # # # # #

Dots swarmed and converged in the distance, then began to steadily grow. The Covenant fleet was moving straight towards them.

"Oh, no, no, no, no, no, _no!_"

Cortez turned her head, looking back to Vista. The Apparition was flying as fast as it could, but the green-gray behemoth of a world had not moved in the window. Unarmed and with nowhere to hide, the apparition would be caught in seconds.

"This is Private Cortez to the _Soberg_, come in, please!"

# # # # # # #

"The fleet bears down, my lord," a member of the bridge crew shouted, "and the humans flee in terror!"

Exli 'Uqsotee burst into the bridge with two Honor Guards sprinting to keep up. The scientist ran to the base of the Shipmaster's platform, skidding to a halt as the shipmaster's hand swung close to the hilt of his blade. Elites across the bridge tensed and raised their weapons, prepared to kill Exli if he threatened the prophet in any way. Exli immediately registered the Shipmaster's disappointment that he had returned alive.

"Halt!" the Shipmaster said. "Stay where you are. You have cost the lives of many of my elites, scientist."

"You must know what I discovered," Exli said.

"Your discoveries came to nothing," the Shipmaster said. "It is too late for our people."

"What I say you must hear!"

"The race is lost!" the Shipmaster boomed. "We looked for a discovery that could earn the prophets' favor, but we looked in the wrong place! If it is the crystal you speak of, it is too late. Word has arrived from High Charity. The Jiralhanae have discovered another Halo."

Exli's mouth hung open. "Another Halo? So soon? How?"

"High Charity will move as soon as the discovery is confirmed," the Shipmaster said. "But any find you can make now shall fall short."

Supposition cried. "Remove this incompetent from my sight!"

Two Sangheili majors grabbed Exli and began to push him to the door.

"The Forerunner facility on this world was built to manufacture these crystals," Exli said. "I have studied a Forerunner archive. I know the artifacts by name. I know where others are!"

Supposition raised a hand, and the guards stopped in their tracks. The scientist passed between them and approached the platform once more.

"But we must-"

"Tell me," the prophet interrupted, "where are these other artifacts?"

"Reach held one," Exli said, "but the humans destroyed it. Eridanus held another, but the humans snatched it away, as well. There are still others; more than a dozen varieties scattered throughout the galaxy."

Supposition lowered his hand, and the guards lowered their weapons. "Speak quickly," he said.

# # # # # # #

"I repeat, can anyone copy?"

Two Seraph fighters closed in on the dropship and opened fire. Bright red projectiles shot out of the craft in streams. Cortez dove to avoid them, but the experienced pilots stayed right on her trail, still spitting needles into the void. She knew that Seraphs were faster and equipped with more powerful weapons, but the intent of the pilots seemed to be to disable the craft - they were only targeting the cockpit. They were only targeting her.

Twisting the controls in her hand, she assumed a nauseating, random flight pattern that seemed to hold the fighters at bay. The seraphs peeled off and Cortez leveled off, but she then saw the reason for their retreat. A covenant capital ship had sprung forward at an alarming rate. It would overtake them in seconds, and the rest of the fleet was not far behind. Cortez rolled the dropship so the capital ship was beneath them rather than above and dove back towards the surface of Coral. Time had run out.

A brilliant white flash appeared less than a hundred meters before them as the UNSC _Soberg_ cut its way out of slipspace. Beaming, Cortez flipped the Apparition on its belly and lined up with the rear of the ship, where the doors of the small cargo bay hung wide open between the aft thrusters.

# # # # # # #

Alarms blared across the board. The commander's hands flew over the console, typing in various commands. A cloud of slipspace probes spewed out from the underbelly of the _Soberg_ in standby, preprogrammed exit vectors waiting to be executed.

"We're being targeted by multiple contacts!"

"Drive capacitors down at fifty-seven percent! We're pulling bare-minimum for a jump!"

"They're in!"

"_Now!"_

The _Soberg_ tore a rip into the eleventh dimension and vanished.

# # # # # # #

"How could you let this happen?" Supposition shouted. "Hunt them down! The crystal must be recovered at all costs!"

"Their ships are slow," the Shipmaster promised, "they shall not escape! Trace their path! Power to the subspace engines!"

"You cannot do this!" Exli shouted. "I have been trying to warn you, all this time! You must recall the fleet! Each of the crystals had a different purpose, some more dangerous than most. I have seen the signature of the one you now pursue, and I tell you now that to enter the alternate space with the artifact in the humans' possession would be suicide!"

"How dare you think that you could comprehend the intent of our lords' creation?" Supposition spewed, waving his frail hands in tightly-clenched fists.

"I do not lie," Exli said. "The artifact of Eridanus was a weapon of unspeakable power! The humans found it. They moved it here, and now they bring it with them. This fleet would be helpless against it! Do not underestimate the power the Forerunners commanded! If you have any regard for your life, you must let the humans go!"

"Enough!" the Shipmaster shouted. "Guards, remove this filth from my sight!"

Two Sangheili majors were on Exli instantly. They roughly hustled him out of the door at gunpoint, landing several nasty blows on the scientist's back and head, but still he called over his shoulder to them.

"You make a mistake that shall be the death us all!"

The door closed. The Shipmaster turned to face Supposition, who glared at him angrily. "Why do you hesitate?" the prophet said. "Catch them! _Catch them!_"

# # # # # # #

The troop bays of the Apparition swung open before the bay had finished repressurizing. Three figures clad in ODST armor jumped out of the craft and headed to the forward exit, unmindful of the damage the dropship had inflicted on the interior wall. As the pressure equalized, the door slid open and Joshua ripped off his helmet as a man walked towards them.

"Tech sergeant Wally Grisham," the man said. "Glad to have you aboard."

"Thanks for picking us up," Cortez said.

"Right this way. We're not out of this yet."

None of them were still wearing their helmets, but the bulky armor was a tight fit through the narrow corridors of the _Soberg_. A short run brought them to the bridge, which was already crowded with two people inside.

"How many decoys were deployed?" Commander Keyes asked.

"Twelve," Morelli replied.

"How many Covie ships jumped?"

"Nine."

"And how many of them are following us?"

"All of them."

"Dammit," Keyes said, staring through the canopy into the emptiness of slipspace. She turned to meet the new arrivals. "Only three of you?"

"All that's left," Murdock said. "ONI Lieutenant Joshua Murdock. This is Private Maria Cortez and Doctor Esko Korpijaakko."

"Lieutenant Commander Miranda Keyes. This is Corporal Jason Morelli. Sergeant Grisham you've already met." The commander sighed, looking back to her console. "I'm sorry, but things are not going well. We have an entire Covenant fleet on our trail, just waiting for us to cut out of the slipstream."

"The slipstream..." Murdock said.

"We can't jump out," Keyes said. "There will be no cover, and we are unable to fight them."

"It can't be luck," he said. "It can't be chance. It's too perfect!"

"What is it?" Keyes asked.

"No," Murdock said. "We can fight them."

"How?" the commander asked, "we don't have any weapons on this heap!"

"Yes," Murdock said, "we do."

The lieutenant turned around to face Esko Korpijaakko, who stared deeply into the crystal in his hands.

"My God," Cortez said. "You're right. You're right!"

Murdock grabbed the crystal, inspecting it. He rotated it, looking for the trigger, but he suddenly stopped.

"What's going on?" Keyes asked.

"What is it?" Esko asked.

"It's different," Murdock said. "It's different than before."

Looking at the lattice of geometry in the low light, the crystal was lacking its most unusual feature. The tesseract that it had once contained was gone. Now it housed a cube.

"What is it? What's wrong?"

"What is that thing?" Keyes asked.

"A weapon," Murdock replied. "A weapon capable of destroying any matter in the slipstream within the blast radius. But it's been changed." He turned to the scientist. "Esko, did you do this?"

"No," he replied. "The elite did."

An alarm sounded in the cockpit, and everyone but Murdock snapped to attention. Down the crowded corridor, Tech Sergeant Grisham turned and ran in the direction of engineering.

"Wally, talk to me," Keyes said.

"The drive capacitor is running down; we double-jumped too fast," the sergeant replied over the comm. "It's the slipspace drive. We jumped with too little power in the capacitor, it was drained from the first jump. We don't have enough power to maintain our slipspace envelope. There's nothing I can do. If we don't jump out of the slipstream in a matter of minutes, we'll fall out. In pieces. Without properly opening a hole back into normal space, we're dead."

"And if we do jump out, the covies will be all over us," Morelli said.

Murdock backed through a door into a confined crew cabin, sitting on the lower bunk that lined the wall. Under Morelli's reading light and against the inappropriate backdrop of soft jazz, he began turning the artifact in his gloved hands. It was no trick of the light. The tesseract was gone.

"I don't get it," Cortez said, "why can't we just use it as it?"

"Because it isn't going to work the way it did before if we don't change it back," Murdock said. "A tesseract represents space within space. If the artifact targets four-dimensional space when the four-dimensional figure is present, then when it's a cube..."

The lieutenant trailed off, staring at the artifact in a cold sweat.

"...then what?" Cortez asked, fear running in her voice. "Then what, Joshua?"

"We've got to figure out how to set this back."

# # # # # # #

"What is happening?" Supposition raged. "Why have we not entered the alternate space?"

"My lord, it appears that the subspace drive is offline!" a member of the bridge crew called.

"What?" the Shipmaster roared.

"How is this happening? I shall have your head if you do not-"

"Silence," the Shipmaster said.

The indignant prophet stared at the elite.

"I know well that my life is over, prophet," the Shipmaster continued, "but let me go about my duty without your incessant nagging while I still can! Now where did that scientist go?"

# # # # # # #

Exli 'Uqsotee breathed a heavy sigh of relief, letting his hands fall away from the holographic console before him. He was alone on the observation deck, the control panel before him configured in a way that it was never meant to be. Looking up through the window, Coral still spun large on the other side of the translucent force field.

So many secrets... so many lies.

The Forerunners were no gods.

The manuscripts that Exli read had told the whole story. At one time, the Forerunners had dominated the entire galaxy... until the Invaders had arrived.

They had come from another galaxy on a journey that had lasted a thousand generations, and they did not wish to share their new breeding ground. Quickly establishing concealed bases on the outwards reaches of the Orion Arm, they had lashed out at Forerunner colony worlds, scouring them of all undesired life with no dialogue and no warning. The Forerunners, long the masters of the galaxy, had been focused on their own internal disputes, but the Invaders were merciless beings with primitive ways and frightful technology. Each planet they captured was transformed into a hive, some of which grew concealed for years, resistant even to Forerunner means of detection. The tunnels of Coral stood as a monument to their ingenuity. But the Forerunners had inevitably prevailed.

After a struggle that had lasted many decades, the Forerunners united to face the new threat, and the Invaders' pattern of growth halted. As tactics and technology improved, the Invaders steadily began to lose ground. Through the power of the crystals, the Forerunners took back what was theirs.

Desperate to hold on to what they had gained, the Invaders created a monster to unleash on their foes. The idea behind the plan was an old one, but devilishly effective: the creation of a weapon which could overwhelm their enemy, but to which they would be immune.

They created the Flood.

# # # # # # #

"No, there's nothing! Only dots, lines, triangles, squares, and the trigger."

Keyes tuned out the bickering in Morelli's quarters and raised Grisham on the intercom.

"How much time do we have left?"

"Capacitor is at thirty percent charge and falling. It will take a twenty-five percent charge to cut back out into normal space. We _have_ no time!"

Keyes called over her shoulder. "Whatever you're planning to do, do it fast!"

"Wait," Cortez said. "We can figure this out. These are simple geometric symbols. They're supposed to be simple to read."

"We tell the artifact what to do by touching them," Esko said, "but how are we supposed to know the proper sequence? There's thousands of possible sequences!"

"I think Maria's right," Murdock said. "Simple. Base."

_Base_.

"Triangles, lines, dots... squares."

"The number of dimensions needed to represent them?" Cortez said.

"The number of vertices," Esko corrected.

"We're running out of time," Keyes called out, "so whatever you're planning to do, do it now!"

"Wait," Murdock said, "that's it! The number of vertices corresponds to the dimension! Triangles... three vertices, third dimension... four vertices, four dimensions... four dimensions... squares!"

Murdock began tapping every square he could see on the artifact. They lit up with a faint white glow upon being touched, and as the sequence was entered, the artifact grew warmer and the light show within grew more complex. As the last symbol was entered, a second cube formed within the first, and lines extended from all vertices to interconnect, forming a tesseract.

Cortez turned and shouted. "Jump out, now!"

Through the cockpit window, there was a quick white flash and stars appeared once again.

Keyes turned around. "The Covenant's going to-"

"Everyone grab on to something!" Murdock shouted. Without hesitation, he pushed the concentric septagons on the artifact.

Murdock's vision flared as if the image were suddenly distorted through a thousand prisms. The room seemed to undulate as the fractured image in front of him melded back together in a matter of seconds. Space twisted and folded on itself, but as the survivors on the UNSC _Soberg_ slowly regained their orientation, no Covenant ships emerged from the slipstream.

"We've made it," Esko said. "We're alive."

Cortez shook her head. "Not all of us."

Murdock set the artifact on the desk before him and withdrew his hand. His eyes looked to the picture on the table of Corporal Jason Morelli's wife and family.

It was over.

# # # # # # #

"My lord..."

"What is it?" the Shipmaster insisted.

"Something has just happened in the alternate space. A great disturbance, originating ten light years away. Our instruments cannot even calculate it."

The Shipmaster shook his head. How could the scientist have been right? "No," he said. "Can you reach the fleet?"

"This is the _Guiding Light_, summoning the _Uniting Promise_, please respond," the communications officer said. Static returned over the board. "This is the _Guiding Light,_ summoning the _Warrior's Blade_, please respond!"

Supposition was curled in his throne like a cornered animal. The Shipmaster simply turned his back. He walked down the ramp off of the commander's platform.

"This is the _Guiding Light_ to the _Righteous Protector_, can anyone hear me?"

The Shipmaster passed between a number of bridge crew, each of which looked to him questioningly as he passed. But the Shipmaster said nothing, and left without looking back.

# # # # # # #

Exli 'Uqsotee stood at the viewport, watching as the planet slowly turned beneath them. Whisper-thin clouds coated its surface, which glowed a dull red on the night side. As the _Guiding Light_ emerged from the world's shadow, the observation deck met the sun. The terminator line between night and day crept along Coral's surface, and light glinted off of the sea of glass.

Footsteps sounded behind him, then the hiss of a plasma sword being activated. Exli turned to face the Shipmaster, who stared ahead in dull resignation.

"They are all gone, are they not?" Exli asked.

"All of them," the Shipmaster said. "You were right."

"The Prophet shall wish to transfer blame for the loss of his fleet," the scientist said.

"You were right. You saved this ship. You saved my crew. But now my life is forfiet."

"You need not take your life in shame," Exli said.

The Shipmaster walked to the window, staring upon the mutilated face of Coral. "I fear for our people," he said. "The Prophets are sure to side with the Jiralhanae in the conflict to come. This may soon happen to our world. I wonder... will our people be ready? And what will happen then?"

The platform at the center of the chamber emerged from the gravlift, bearing an indignant prophet and a number of armed Sangheili honor guards.

"How- how dare you turn your backs to me!" Supposition wailed. "You shall pay for this failure, Shipmaster; you and all of your kin! You allowed the humans to escape, and you sent your entire fleet to its destruction when you were explicitly warned not to!"

"Suddenly it's _your_ fleet?" the scientist muttered.

"And you," Supposition said to Exli, "how _dare_ you question my authority? You have blasphemed against the Covenant for the last time! I shall see both of you to the executioner's blade!"

"Noble prophet," the Shipmaster began, but the prophet silenced him with a wave. Sangheili honor guards advanced, weapons drawn.

"Your lives are over," the prophet gloated. "Your race has proven its incompetence for the last time. I shall consult with the council, and I shall see to it that the Jiralhanae are advanced for their true contribution to the Covenant!"

The Shipmaster raised his sword, and was instantly burned down by the honor guards, who continued to shoot the body as it lay on the floor.

Exli held his hands out in resignation, looking over his shoulder to the planet that filled the window as honor guards advanced on him.

# # # # # # #

Wind whistled through narrow air ducts in the abandoned tunnels. Doors hung open, melted steel faceplates lying on the floor. A half-eaten can of cold food sat on a table in the empty mess hall. A low, mournful sound echoed through the Hall of the Mountain King, buried half a kilometer beneath the fiery surface of a dead planet. But in this desolate place, a monster was awakening.

Papers were scattered across the floor of the communications center, and an M6C magnum lay abandoned on the floor. Two heavy feet slammed into the deck with a crunch, and began shuffling towards the figure lying prone on the floor.

Yuji Miyagi, no longer remotely human, looked down upon the body of Michael Jones with no emotion. The red stain on the wall was still warm, the man's head now sporting a bloody hole. A quiet beep emitted from the man's watch, and the Flood looked back to the hole in the roof of the communications center it had entered as the entire room began to descend.

The communications center docked with the code room, and the door slid into the wall. Miyagi turned, shuffling to the door as a handful of Flood infection-forms spilled into the room from above and slithered over to Jones' body. But it was for nothing. All memory of the reset code had been physically destroyed.

Miyagi stared at the bright red digital timer until it reached zero.

# # # # # # #

Nine fusion warheads, encased in lithium triteride armor, detonated in sequence the moment the confirm code reached them. As they detonated, they compressed a mass of fusionable semisolid hydrogen at the heart of the ring to neutron-star density. Atoms crushed in on themselves, protons and electrons combined to form neutrons, transforming the hydrogen into an atomic nucleus a full millimeter across, but the mass and gravity were insufficient to sustain this state. The miniature neutron star destabilized and the material rebounded, vaporizing its shielding in a fraction of a billionth of a second and meeting the combined blast waves of nine fusion bombs. The detonating matter inside the bombs was enriched by the energy of the exploding neutron star, and the thermonuclear yield of the fusion warheads was boosted a hundredfold.

From the observation deck of the Covenant cruiser _Guiding Light_, Exli watched as the planet erupted beneath them. Cracks appeared across its entire surface, and a second sun appeared on the dayside. The NOVA, buried nearly half a kilometer beneath the surface of Coral, vaporized all of the rock between it and the surface, sending ejecta spewing far into space.

Supposition watched in horror as the blast wave tore through space towards them, and the _Guiding Light _was bathed in blinding light.

The tortured world had been put out of its misery forever.


	9. Transgression

**Chapter Eight: Transgression**

_UNSC Soberg, in slipspace en route to Earth__  
October 10, 2552  
0100 hours, recalibrated military time_

A re-purposed ONI stealth ship, the _Soberg_ was not built for comfort. With two cabins and four bunks between them, the six people on board had taken to sleeping in shifts, and with its slipspace drive partially disabled, power consumption on the ship had to be reduced to a minimum over the course of the return trip. The crew of the _Soberg_ had been very accommodating to their new guests, going so far as to synchronize the interior lights with the time zone they had been accustomed to. But it was not jet lag that kept Maria Cortez awake.

_You're out_, she reminded herself. _Just four more days to Earth_.

Earth. She closed her eyes and tried to picture an open blue sky over her head and solid earth beneath her feet, but the image would not come. The claustrophobic accommodations on board the _Soberg_ were little different than the Hall of the Mountain King had been, and the oxygen recirculator in the ship's life support systems sounded just as decrepit. When she closed her eyes, the illusion was complete. Sitting up, the private looked out the tiny viewport in the wall and immediately regretted it. The viewport betrayed no sign of a universe beyond the ship. No stars shone in the blackness. There was only the infinite emptiness of slipstream space. It looked like a wall pressing against the ship from all sides, imprisoning them.

A sudden noise overhead snapped her back to reality. On the upper bunk, Dr. Korpijaakko let out a loud snore at irregular intervals. He seemed to have no trouble sleeping at all. Shaking her head in frustration, she pressed a hand against her right temple. The dull throb which had been there since the day before was growing stronger. She had to get out of this ship. But it would have to wait.

"Four more days," she muttered, standing up.

The corridor outside her shared cabin ran the entire length of the ship. It was shorter than the hallway which had been outside of her old apartment. At one end, Miranda Keyes and Jason Morelli were in the bridge. Though the door was half-closed, Maria could see that he had placed a comforting hand on his commander's shoulder, and although her head was down, the Keyes was gripping the corporal's other hand tightly. Maria had gathered that Miranda had received some very bad news shortly before they met, but had the good sense not to ask about it. It came as a surprise to see this degree of intimacy between them, but strangely, it made Maria feel that much more alone. Not wishing to disturb them, she quickly shuffled off in the other direction.

A short climb up a ladder delivered her to the ship's tiny galley. She felt a sudden searing pain in her temple as the motion-activated lights dazzled her, and was quick to dial them down. After dry-swallowing two painkillers, Maria Cortez had to feel her way out of the tiny galley to keep from knocking things over. But as she was about to return to her quarters, she recognized a dim light coming down the hall. The door of Murdock's shared cabin was partly open. Standing in the darkness of the hallway, Cortez cautiously looked through the door to see Murdock staring at the tiny framed photo of Corporal Morelli's wife and son.

"I can't see her," he said without turning.

Cortez wordlessly entered the room and sat on the cot beside him.

"We fought the last time we spoke to each other," he continued. "The last time we spoke in person. Now I can't remember her face. When I think of what happened... I don't know how I could have dismissed her like that. Now it's too late to take it back."

Murdock gently set the photograph back on the shelf and folded his hands, looking wistfully at his wristwatch.

"I had promised her that my last assignment would be the end of it," he continued. "Working on Earth. We were apart for so long... it was dangerous business and she knew it, even if I could never tell her what I did. She always asked me what drew me back there... and I still don't have a good answer."

"Why did you do it?" Cortez asked.

"I thought I was making a difference," Murdock said. "Working for Section Zero. I thought I was making a difference for the war. But all of it... all of our little games... none of it could save Coral. I told her that I loved her... and I gave her up for them."

Cortez took his hand.

"The game isn't over," he said, facing her. "It's never going to stop. A world is dead now because of them. They can't have that exposed. As long as we're alive, they will never stop hunting us."

As he spoke, her expression changed from one of sympathy to a sadness so deep that he wanted to look away. It was finally hitting her that, after all they had been through, even now there would be no going home. Her family, whom he would never meet, could not even be informed that she was still alive. Was this the freedom they had attained? With a pang of guilt, Murdock tried to pull his hand away, but Cortez gripped it tightly, wiping an eye with her other hand and taking a breath before responding.

"Then I suppose it's for the best that we're not," she said.

Murdock nodded, resisting the tears that now fought for his eyes. Cortez pressed tight against him and he wrapped an arm around her, staring blindly at the wall as they gently rocked together in the dim light. He cried, and she cried with him. They held each other for a long time.

# # # # # # #

_Undisclosed Location__  
Undisclosed System  
October 22, 2552_

Hearing footsteps echoing down the hall, two ODSTs standing guard at the door snapped a quick salute to a man who approached alone. The colonel presented his identification to one of the men as the other stood by warily with an MA7B assault rifle. Nodding, the first ODST raised a small red light and flashed it in the colonel's eyes. The colonel did not blink.

The ODST glanced at the readout and nodded.

"You're cleared. Welcome back, sir."

Tapping a key card against a titanium-encased scanner which seemed quite out of place, the housing opened to reveal a holographic control panel encased within it. The ODST triggered the controls, and after a few seconds the door between the two armor-clad soldiers opened, and the colonel stepped through. Stopping in the center of the octagon-shaped platform, the colonel touched another hologram and the door sealed shut behind him.

The elevator shaft flew by at a dizzying rate, polished blue walls decorated with intricate geometric patterns. The man on the platform straightened the collar of his black dress uniform as the floating platform slowly drifted to a stop on a wave of inverted gravity. Glancing briefly up the octagonal shaft into the far-off darkness, the colonel stepped out onto the deck. Tapping his identity card against another scanner, he waved a hand through the hologram it opened to reveal, and the door hissed open to reveal the chamber beyond.

Fully forty meters in diameter, the massive room was filled by a photo-realistic hologram of the milky way galaxy. Beneath the hologram, a deep shaft sank away into darkness, with a single bridge forged of pure light reaching from the edge of the room towards an ominous holographic control beneath the galactic center. Among the simulated stars and noble gasses, alien runes highlighted seven locations; one of them accompanied by flashing red text. Pausing only briefly to take in the spectacle, the colonel quickly made way to the other side of the room, passing several more labs and checkpoints before coming to a stop before the metal door of his own office. Sliding his card through the scanner, the colonel entered the room, visibly flinching upon recognizing the man who was seated behind his desk.

"Sir," he said.

"Ah, hello James." The Admiral typed a command, and the tire-shaped object projected by the holoframe monitor on the desk shrunk to a point and vanished. Ackerson dusted the front of his uniform in a quick sweep and cleared his throat before speaking.

"You came in person, sir?" the colonel asked.

"I thought I would take this opportunity to observe your operation for myself," the Admiral replied. "I must say, I like what you've done with the place."

"Then my operation is meeting your expectations?"

"Of course, colonel. Your reputation was no mistake."

"And from what I know of yours, sir," Ackerson said, "I know that you do not travel lightly."

At that, the admiral's smile quickly dropped. Setting down his coffee, he retrieved a brown folder stamped 'Classified' from his portfolio and placed it on the desk before the colonel. Ackerson made no move for it.

The admiral folded his hands. "Sit," he ordered.

# # # # # # #

_October 10, 2552  
0500 hours, recalibrated military time_

With the audible snap of a breaker, the lights turned on full. Cortez opened her eyes to find herself alone in her cabin. She could not remember how or when she got there. Sitting up in the bunk, she glanced through bleary eyes at a collection of gauges and indicators mounted on the opposite wall. Some of the amber lights had turned green since last she saw them. It took her a moment to remember that, with the limited space on the _Soberg_, she had been quartered in Grisham's cabin. The engineer must have been hard at work while the rest of them slept.

Standing barefoot on the cold metal deck, Cortez pressed a button and the cabin door hissed into the wall. The familiar hum of the slipspace drive had cut out, and as she approached the bridge, Cortez could see welcome stars through the glassteel canopy of the bridge-slash-cockpit. Lieutenant Commander Keyes sat in the pilot's chair, with Joshua looking over her shoulder at the controls. He turned as she approached and nodded curtly, but said nothing.

"Hey," Cortez said, stepping through the door. Looking at the canvas of stars outside, it was immediately clear that they were not in the Sol system. Beyond the glassteel canopy, a red giant star the size of a grapefruit held at arm's length painted the console before Keyes a dull red. "Where are we?"

"Neutral territory. Outside UNSC space." Keyes glanced at the private over her shoulder. "Lieutenant Murdock and I agreed that it would be best to lose the Covenant dropship in our hold before returning home."

"There was speculation that the Covenant may have found Reach by tagging one of our ships at Sigma Octanus and letting us lead them to it," Murdock said. "There's no telling what kind of tracking technology they might have built into one of their own craft."

Cortez nodded, still gazing through the canopy. The red giant's corona hung around it like a cloud, staining the surrounding space into a muddy haze. "Barbecue?"

"Maybe, if we knew how to operate the dropship's autopilot," Murdock said, his face bathed in an unsettling shade of red. "We'll have to settle for something more thorough. Once Wally is done repairing the primary capacitor for the slipspace drive, we'll jump back in and dump the dropship there, then jump back into normal space. Once our slipspace envelope collapses and the dropship passes out it, the mass of the dropship - and everything on it - will be converted to energy. In realspace, we won't feel a thing. It will make a detectable pulse in slipspace, but we'll be long gone before the Covenant can nail down a location."

"Have we been set back much?"

"No more than two days," Murdock finished. He turned to Keyes. "Are we done here, ma'am?"

"Yes, Lieutenant. Dismissed."

Murdock stepped past Cortez on his way out of the cockpit. "Private," he said.

Watching him leave, Cortez was unsettled. After what they had gone through, and after he had confided in her last night, she would have thought he would address her by name and not as a subordinate. It was then that she realized he had given her a veiled command. Turning once more, the private excused herself from the bridge as well and followed the lieutenant down the empty corridor to the galley.

# # # # # # #

It did not take long to prepare the dropship for its final voyage. Manipulating the small, holographic cube in her hand, Cortez started the ship into a lazy drift backwards through the open hangar bay. Through the viewport in front of her, bands of unknowable energy could be seen passing between the two troop bays. A massive pair of dents marred the wall of the hangar bay where she had not-so-gently brought the dropship in for a landing a few days earlier. Though embarrassing, Wally had assured them that the wall was still spaceworthy, and it needed to be - the bay was depressurized.

Clad in his ODST armor, Esko stood calmly by the massive ship, not four feet from the edge of the open bay door. Beyond it was the black nothingness of slipspace, from which no rescue would be possible. Watching the ship slip by, he waved as it crossed the threshold. Cortez quickly touched a holographic rune to her left, and the wall gave way as the cockpit opened. Pushing herself out, she reached out and took hold Esko's gloved hand, gently lifting him off the deck in the null gravity as the dropship slid past them into the inky void. The tether clipped to Esko's suit went taut and pulled them gently back into the bay, while the dropship faded from view as quickly as it passed out of the ship's exterior lights. With shocking speed, the hangar doors slammed shut, and the lights flashed from red to yellow. The artificial gravity reactivated, tugging them to the deck in a jarring impact.

"It's done, folks," came Wally's voice over their radios. "Nice work."

Wordlessly, Maria reached behind Esko and unclipped the safety tether from him.

"Thanks," he said, his voice marred by static.

"No, thank _you_," she replied, glancing back at the sealed bay doors. Wrapping the tether into a coil around her arm, Cortez walked towards the storage locker it had come from as the doctor turned his attention to the pressure indicator.

"Private," he said, "I have been meaning to ask. How did you ever learn to fly a Covenant dropship?"

Not facing him, Maria raised her head. "There's not so much to it as you'd think. There was a man back on Coral who told us the basics. An ONI man, back at the dig site. Travis Schnaidt." The loops of the tether fit neatly on the hook in the locker. "He wasn't the only spook there, mind you, but he grew closest to the guard detail. He associated with us more than the others. Shared stories. Not a bad poker player, either. He was with us when 'Yerumee's party landed; he fought alongside us when we captured them. And when the Covenant arrived, he was the one who sent me away. He died there, after making sure that nothing the science team had learned would fall into enemy hands."

At last, she turned. "It's funny, now that I think of it. You know that out of all the people in that camp... _you_ were the only one Schnaidt told me to retrieve."

His attention fixed on the pressure indicator, Esko began to say something, but stopped himself short. His mouth hung open for a moment as realization hit; searching for an answer, searching for an excuse, but he knew it was too late. It was already written in her tone that the jig was up. Sighing and shaking his head, Esko turned to face her again, surprised to find the hint of a smile on her face.

"When did you know?" he asked.

"For certain? When you knew the code to get yourself into that lockdown lab."

"There _was_ that." A smile briefly crossed Esko's face. Such knowledge was not exactly privy to an outsider. A stupid move on his part. The humor of it was quickly lost on Maria, and Esko's own quickly gave way to somber realization.

"I'll take it as a courtesy that you didn't tell him?" he said.

"I couldn't do that to Joshua after what's happened," Cortez replied.

"I understand," Esko said.

"You really don't. And neither do I."

"Fair to say."

"Two days ago, we destroyed an entire enemy flotilla," she continued. "Nine Covenant warships. _Nine_ of them. We could have easily lost thirty ships in a conventional exchange, but we did it bloodlessly with a single pulse from that crystal."

"That's right."

Turning her back, she quickly retrieved something from the locker. Esko stared deeply into the strange light the crystal emitted, and the curious tesseract it contained. The deck shifted slightly underfoot as the _Soberg_ exited slipspace, and Esko glanced at the closed hangar bay doors with new understanding.

"Why the change of heart?" Esko asked. "He was the one who wanted us to go back for it in the first place."

"He thinks now that the Covenant will track the crystal to Earth, the same way they found Coral," Maria said. "Joshua wanted me to destroy it, and after what's happened, I can't fault him for that. He blames you now for what happened. He blames Section Zero. But he's is too close to Coral to look at this objectively. As I see it, it's almost certain at this stage in the game that the Covenant is going to find Earth, no matter what we do. Earth is all we've got left, and this may be our only real chance to protect it." Her eyes narrowed. "I know what's in store for me upon our return, given what I've seen. Given what I know. But I've made my decision. There is nothing more important right now than that crystal. Even us."

She placed the crystal in his hands. After a moment's thought, Esko nodded and turned towards the corridor leading to the cockpit, where Murdock was. "Neither of you need to worry about that, from my agency at least. We know our own," he turned to her, "and we need all of the good soldiers we can get."

The private nodded. Though she was visibly relieved, Esko still saw wariness in her, and for good reason. "Colonel Ackerson may be another story," he continued.

"I might have ventured a guess," Cortez said immediately. "Why were you working with him?"

"You do not need to know the full history behind the work our agency does," Esko said.

"I don't expect it."

"But, suffice to say, certain Section III weapons programs have developmental steps which cannot be conducted within the bounds of UNSC law. Special exemptions can be made to let their work go forward. These exempt programs still require oversight, though, and we sometimes act as moles to make sure they do not overstep the bounds _we_ created for them. It's a dirty business, but when faced with extinction, we're left with little choice. It's a fine line we walk."

"So you're 'Coalminer?'"

"I was a part of the chain. The _Applebee_ was ultimately meant to deliver the sample. But having learned what the Flood is capable of, I think, once my superiors learn of this, the colonel will find himself in some difficulty."

"And what about us?"

"That depends on you. So long as you keep quiet about what you have seen, my agency will do what it can to protect you," Esko said. "I would guess by now that you and... Joshua, have realized the need to conceal your identities. Whoever you decide to become, we have the means to make it happen. Birth certificates, tax records... we can dust your trail in places you thought it never existed. Neither of you will even know it's happening, but we'll be there. It's all a matter of what you choose to do."

"I'm staying with the corps," Maria said.

"I'm happy to hear it."

"But I'll want a promotion. After all this, I figure I at least deserve a pay raise."

"You certainly do," Esko grinned. "I'll see what we can do about that."

# # # # # # #

Colonel James Ackerson read the first three pages of the report impassively while the admiral waited. He read them faster than he let on, trying to give himself time to think. The cover sheet had said that the report was written by the interrogator that Section Zero had openly dispatched to the Hall of the Mountain King, but Ackerson knew better. Station Director Miyagi would have reported it if the interrogator had discovered the Flood. This report described the parasite in full, grisly detail, confirming something the colonel had already expected - there had been a mole in the Hall of the Mountain King. What Ackerson did not know was if the Admiral knew that he knew it.

At last, the colonel closed the report and wordlessly slid it back across the desk.

"When we entered into this arrangement, you said that certain biological samples would play a key role in advancing your program," the Admiral said. "You shared information with us about the nature of these samples. This account paints a far darker picture of this organism than your report did. James, what the hell have you dug up?"

"I said I needed _samples_, sir," the colonel replied. "That is all. I'm fully aware of the risks. My science team does not need a living specimen to complete our research, and I did not intend to retrieve one. This report your agent submitted presents an absolute worst-case scenario - frankly, sir, it's irresponsible, and I would have expected better from one of your own."

"The point, James, is that we entered this arrangement on the condition that you would keep every facet of your operation open to my scrutiny."

"Yes sir, Admiral," Ackerson said. "But surely this single breach of protocol would not warrant-"

"No, of course. Your program has value, James. That is the only reason I permitted it in the first place. It is another question entirely if you should be permitted to continue to run it, however."

Every muscle in the colonel's face tightened, as if he had been punched in the gut. "Sir?"

"Calm down, James," the Admiral said. "I'm not taking King Under the Mountain away from you. But in the future, I will still expect you to abide by the terms of our agreement, and maintain transparency. You have full operational knowledge of the proceedings here, and I know for a fact that there is not enough time to train a replacement. The Navy needs results _now_, and you will have to be the one to give them to us. Now, I understand that the Hall of the Mountain King was a total loss. These samples were lost with the facility. So the question is, can your program survive this?"

"I have already located an alternative source for the samples I need," Ackerson quickly answered, "and arrangements have been made to retrieve them. General Strauss is in charge of the specifics. As for the original sample, its loss set us back by several weeks, but we have progressed as scheduled in all other areas. I don't plan to let this slow us down. We will be ready for deployment in two months."

"Good," the Admiral said. "I will be staying in this facility for the time being. I expect to see these samples firsthand when you retrieve them."

_A set-up, then,_ Ackerson thought with disgust. That was the purpose of the entire meeting. Now there would be moles in his operation here, as well. Against his better judgment, the colonel spoke once more.

"You mean you did not receive a sufficient description of this organism from your source?"

"Lieutenant Murdock is not available for questioning, colonel. He died with the rest of the facility's staff when the Covenant glassed the planet."

"Pardon my saying so, sir, but come off it already! You know, and I know, and you know that I know that a radio beacon deployment vessel made an unscheduled return from deep space six days ago, carrying survivors from the Coral facility. We have a leak. Two of them, as I understand it."

The admiral folded his hands, seemingly unfazed by the revelation that Ackerson had known. "The man you speak of is a valuable asset, Colonel. These days, such men are rare."

"Yes, yes," the colonel interrupted. "Versed in self-defense, stands up to questioning both casual and coerced, muddled genetic background, working knowledge of half a dozen different languages... this really isn't all that surprising for having grown up in a hellhole like Coral, Admiral. Refuse from every corner of the galaxy is shuttled through there."

The admiral smirked quizzically. The colonel sniffed.

"Well, _was_," he continued. "You have your sources, Admiral, and I have mine. I will concede that it took a good deal of effort to track him down, what with the way your people bandy identities about. But he has gone under again, and I can't help but be a little suspicious that he may have received... outside help."

Ackerson leaned in and placed his hands on the admiral's desk.

"I'll try to be as straightforward as I can, sir. This man has gone rogue, and poses a threat both to my program and Section III as a whole. I understand your department's aim for neutrality, sir, and I will not force your hand. But if you are unwilling to take action in this matter, then you will have forced mine."

"I believe this discussion is over, James."

Ackerson crossed his arms in frustration. "Well, then, what of the woman? She is no less a threat to this program. She has no security clearance, and has never been under your employ. What do you gain by protecting her?"

Admiral John Clark's expression darkened. "Colonel... you are dismissed."

* * *

**Author's Note:** Though very, very, _very_ overdue, I hope you enjoyed this chapter and this story. _Tomb of Glass_ is meant to serve as a prequel to _Halo 3: Collapse_ - which I will now be returning my focus to - but the events of this chapter in particular will be very important to the rest of _Collapse_. More on this in chapters to come. Until then, a big thank you to all my readers for your continued feedback and support.


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